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Speaker
| | John Griswold |
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| | Date | | Oct 26, 2009 |
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| | Time | | 4:30 pm
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| | Location | | Illini Union Bookstore Authors Corner |
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| | Cost | | Free |
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| | Sponsor | | Department of English, Illini Union Bookstore |
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| | Contact | | Scott Baseler |
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| | E-Mail | | sbaseler@illinois.edu |
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| | Phone | | 217-333-2050 |
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| | Event type | | Reading/Signing |
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| | Views | | 378 |
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| A DEMOCRACY OF GHOSTS, by John Griswold, is the love story of four couples, set against the backdrop of the Herrin Massacre of 1922. This clash of miners and strikebreakers in Bloody Williamson County, in Southern Illinois, resulted in the deaths of 21 men -- 19 of them the "scabs" tortured and murdered by average men, women, and even children in what was once the most radical community in America.
Griswold has drawn from contemporary eyewitnesses and news accounts, an ethnography of the area, histories, and his own grandfather's letters to create the lives of four fictional couples whose ambitions, self-doubts, and social and sexual jealousies contribute to this great American violence that still echoes down through time.
John Griswold has taught undergraduate creative writing (prose), literature, and rhetoric at UIUC since 2000.
His stories, poems, and essays have been in War, Literature and the Arts; Brevity; Perigee; Ninth Letter; and Natural Bridge, which nominated him for the 2001 Pushcart Prize. He's currently at work on a nonfiction book to be released in 2010 by The History Press.
As Oronte Churm, John is also a contributing writer for Inside Higher Ed, a columnist for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and has pieces in Mountain Man Dance Moves (McSweeney's Books) and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3 (WW Norton). |
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