News Release

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Tim O’Brien, Vietnam veteran, winner
of National Book Award, to visit UNC

CHAPEL HILL — National Book Award winner and Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien will give a free public reading on Feb. 28 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As the 2007 Morgan Writer-in-Residence at UNC, O’Brien will read at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall’s Beasley-Curtis Auditorium. Three panels focused on the theme “Telling the Story,” also free to the public, will be part of O’Brien’s visit.

He also will visit creative writing classes, meet informally with students and hold forums for creative writing students to discuss the writing process.

O’Brien, who opposed the Vietnam War, was drafted in 1968. He won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service there and has been writing about it ever since, providing some of the most compelling, war-related fiction of our time.            

He wrote an acclaimed memoir and seven books of fiction, including “Going After Cacciato” (1978), winner of the National Book Award; “The Things They Carried” (1990), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and “In the Lake of the Woods” (1994), named the best novel of the year by Time magazine and one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times.

“My life is storytelling,” O’Brien once said. “I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.”

The free public panels, which feature O’Brien, faculty from UNC (unless otherwise noted), alumni and guest speakers, will be:

• Monday (Feb. 26), 3 p.m. “The Novel as History, History as a Novel.” Panelists will include O’Brien; Dr. Joy Kasson, professor and chair of American studies, who investigates the intersection of American literature, visual studies and cultural history; and Dr. Joe Glatthaar, professor and chair of peace, war and defense, who specializes and teaches courses in the American Civil War and American military history. Glatthaar was historical consultant for E.L. Doctorow’s book, “The March.”Location: Toy Lounge, Dey Hall.

• Feb. 28, 2 p.m. “War: Telling the Story.” Panelists will include O’Brien; Loyd Little, educator and author of Hemingway Prize-winner “Parthian Shot”; and Alex Vernon, primary author of  “The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War,” (1999), which won the Army Historical Foundation Award. He also wrote “Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien” (2004), and his own recent memoir on being a soldier,  “most succinctly bred” (2006). Vernon, who earned a doctorate in English from UNC, teaches at Hendrix College in Arkansas. Location: Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library.

• March 2, noon. “War: Coming Home.” Panelists include Rye Barcott, a 2001 UNC graduate who served with Marines in Bosnia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen and Iraq; Dr. Jonathan Abramowitz, associate professor of psychology and an expert on post traumatic stress disorder; Dr. Joseph T. Cox, who earned a doctorate at UNC in 1990 and is a Vietnam veteran, father of an Iraq veteran, poet and headmaster of the Haverford (Pa.) School; and Dr. Michael Hunt, panel moderator, distinguished professor of history and an expert on U.S. foreign policy and Vietnam. Location: Toy Lounge, Dey Hall. Attendees are invited to bring a bag lunch; drinks and dessert will be provided.

The Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program, the English and comparative literature department and the College of Arts and Sciences will sponsor the panels.

Carolina alumni Allen and Musette Morgan of Memphis, Tenn., established the Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program in 1993 to bring writers of distinction to UNC. Previous Morgan Writers have included Joan Didion, the late Shelby Foote, Annie Dillard, Beth Henley, Richard Ford, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Russell Banks, Richard Wilbur, John Edgar Wideman, Tobias Wolff and Calvin Trillin.

Limited parking for the events is available in the Swain visitor’s lot on Cameron Avenue or in commercial lots on Rosemary Street. For more information, call (919) 962-4283 or visit http://english.unc.edu/morgan_program/.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/O'BrienTim.JPG

Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program contact: Dr. Susan H. Irons, (919) 962-4283, susan_irons@unc.edu
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu