Description
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: “The Art of Contemporary Fiction”
Percival Everett is a master at taking well-known literary styles and flipping them on their heads to help readers view the world through creative new lenses. In this engaging talk, he will share fascinating anecdotes about how he created his diverse bibliography. We will discover the historical events, societal issues, and literary influences that have inspired the range of subjects he tackles in his works and how and why he takes a unique approach to the creative process.
About Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s novel, James, has been short listed for both the 2024 National Book Award and the 2024 Booker Prize. Everett, one of the most innovative writers in contemporary American literature, is the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
He has written more than thirty books including novels, poetry, and short story collections which have won numerous prizes and international accolades. His captivating and immensely diverse collection of genre-bending literary works challenges and inspires readers to contemplate and reconsider the societal and cultural forces that shape our worldviews.
His most recent books include James, an instant New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by the New York Times Book Review; Dr. No, finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; So Much Blue;Erasure;
and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023.
Everett lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and
their children.
By Percival Everett:
