Author Allan Gurganus will present Skidmore’s 38th annual Frances Steloff Lecture at 8 pm Thursday, Oct. 1, in Gannett. Gurganus will read from a new work of fiction, talk with Mason Stokes and Robert Boyers and host a brief question and answer session with the audience.

Le Monde lauds Gurganus calling him the Mark Twain of our age and Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, called him “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty.” Gurganus has worked with the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gurganus’s first published story, “Minor Heroism,” appeared in The New Yorker when he was 26. His first book, the 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, spent eight months on The New York Times best-seller list, and was made into an Emmy Award-winning television program. White People, a collection of stories and novellas, received The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a Pen-Faulkner finalist. His latest book, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas, received the Lambda Literary Award. His new novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church, will be the second in The Falls Trilogy that commenced with Widow.

Gurganus’s short fiction appears in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and other magazines, and has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best New Stories of the South. His political editorials often appear in The New York Times. <via Scope>

A smattering of Gurganus’s essays are available for free on his website.