Best Selling Author and Literary Sensation Dave Eggers to Speak at OWU

March 17, 2005

DELAWARE, OHIO -- Literary sensation Dave Eggers, a New York Times bestselling author and editor, will speak at Ohio Wesleyan on Tuesday, March 22 at 4:10 p.m. in the Benes Room of the Hamilton-Williams Campus Center as this year's Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecturer.

Eggers made his explosive debut to the American literary scene in 2000 with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers' account of being orphaned in college and "inheriting" his 7-year-old brother when both parents died of cancer in a span of five weeks, of cancer, AHWoSG was hailed by the New York Times as "a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of book that noisily announces the debut of a talented--yes, staggeringly talented new writer." The book went on to become a national bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Also the author of a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2003), and a collection of stories, How We Are Hungry (2004), Eggers is currently the editor of McSweeney's a quarterly literary journal billed on its website as "a journal created by nervous people in relative obscurity, and published four times a year." He is also the editor of The Best American Non-Required Reading series and the founder of 826Valencia, a San Francisco writing lab for young people, and its sister organization, 826NYC.

Picture of Dave Eggers obtained from the University of Illinois Web site.