Spring Literary Festival Features Madison Bell Feb. 22

SALISBURY, MD---Salisbury State University welcomes National Book Award winner Madison Smartt Bell as part of the University’s annual Writers-on-the-Shore Series.

Bell reads Thursday, February 22, in the Montgomery Room of The Commons at 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Director of the Katz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College, he will read from his new book, Master of the Crossroads - a tale about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian slave uprising of the late 18th century. 

The book “is a brilliant performance, the work of an accomplished novelist of peculiar energy and courage. This book alone . . . contains nearly 700 pages of densely realized fiction, in addition to various prefaces and appendixes,” said Jay Parini in a review for The New York Times. 

Bell is the author of nine novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989.

Bell also has published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). His eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race.

Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York, London and now Baltimore. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B 1979) and Hollins College (M.A. 1981), he has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he has taught at Goucher College where he is an English professor.

 For information visit the University's Web site at www.salisbury.edu or call 410-543-6030.