The next author invited to Denison University by the Beck Lecture Series is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Robert Olen Butler has written 10 novels and three collections of short stories, including "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His appearance at Denison is set for 8 p.m. on Thursday (Feb. 2) in the board room of Barney Davis Hall.

Butler is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee where he also holds the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing and serves as director of the University's creative writing program. He earned his bachelor's degree in theatre at Northwestern University and a master's degree at the University of Iowa where he switched to playwriting.

A Vietnam veteran, where he served as a counter-intelligence special agent and as a translator, he won the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award for outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran from the Vietnam Veterans of America. Among his works are "The Alleys of Eden," "Tabloid Dreams," "The Deep Green Sea," and "Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards." "The Alleys of Eden" was the first novel in a trilogy on the Vietnam War, which was followed by "Sun Dogs" and "On Distant Grounds."

Butler's stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and Gentlemen's Quarterly. He also is included in multiple editions of "The Best American Short Stories" and "New Stories from the South." He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he won a National Magazine Award in Fiction in 2001. Since 1995 he has written feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney and Universal Pictures.

Calendar Listing:

CALENDAR LISTING: Denison University, Granville -- Beck Lecture Series presents novelist Robert Olen Butler; 8 p.m., Thursday (Feb. 2), board room of Barney Davis Hall (200 West Loop). Free and open to the public. Call 740-587-6207 to confirm information.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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