Writer Lorrie Moore’78 receives international acclaim, including
her most recent selection as the recipient of the 18th
annual PEN/Malamud Award, given annually since 1988
in honor of the late Bernard Malamud to recognize a body of work
which demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction. Moore
also received an honorary degree from St. Lawrence in 2004,
and returned to her alma mater in fall 2005 to participate in the University
Writers Series.
Lorrie Moore’s novels, essays and short stories are filled with contradictions.
She blends, as one reviewer wrote, boldness with poignancy, nouns and adjectives
that never matched before, colorful detail and meaningful blur.
A Phi Beta Kappa English major at St. Lawrence,
where she wrote a short story that won first prize in a contest sponsored
by Seventeen magazine
and thus launched her career, Moore earned her M.F.A. from Cornell
University. Her master’s thesis became her first book, Self-Help,
and her subsequent work has included two novels, two fiction collections,
a children’s
book, and short stories, reviews and essays in such periodicals as
the New
York Times Book Review, Cosmopolitan and Ms. Magazine.
She has been honored by the National Endowment for the
Arts and
has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In her 2004 Commencement address
at St. Lawrence, she said, "Most of what
is good and useful and helpful and beautiful in the world comes from
an imagination that is being vigorously used. To imagine – which
means to step away slightly from what is strictly one's own point
of view – is at the heart of tolerance
if not understanding, sympathy if not actual explicit generosity.”
Since 1984, Moore has taught at the University of Wisconsin, where
she holds the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities.
