Event details
October 15, 2019, 8 PM
Location: Payne Room
Free and open to the public
The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College
Join us on Tuesday October 15, at 8:00 PM, for the 49th Annual Steloff Lecture delivered by novelist Mary Gaitskill, who will read from her controversial story “This Is Pleasure,” and respond to audience questions. Gaitskill will receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters from President Glotzbach and a book signing will follow the presentation.
The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College. This event is free and open to the public.
Skidmore’s annual Frances Steloff Lecture honors the work of a major literary figure. The Steloff Lecture series was established in 1967 at Skidmore by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs, founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, and well-known patron of writers. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Notable Steloff speakers have included five Nobel Prize winners and dozens of the world’s most important writers. Previous Steloff honorees include Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colm Toibin, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, John Banville, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and Don’t Cry, and the novels The Mare, Veronica (nominated for the National Book Award), and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Artforum, and Granta, among many other journals, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.