Award-winning novelist Richard Bausch to present annual Lectio Magistralis

Richard Bausch, the nationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, has joined
Chapman University’s
Department of English faculty as a full-time professor, and will celebrate his arrival on the Orange campus by offering a free public talk – “Why Literature Can Save Us” – on Monday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m. in the university’s Memorial Hall.  The talk is part of Chapman’s
Lectio Magistralis
 series of free lectures by noted faculty members.

“No writer has a finer insight into the delicate matters of the human heart than Richard Bausch,” hails Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler.  Bausch, who previously taught at the University of Memphis and launched an immensely successful community creative writing workshop there, moved to Orange over the summer and began teaching classes at Chapman this fall.  He joins a distinguished writing faculty in Chapman’s Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences that includes novelist/screenwriter Mark Axelrod, pioneering steampunk-fiction author Jim Blaylock, nonfiction writer Tom Zoellner, poet Anna Leahy, novelist Ryan Gattis and others.

Bausch is the author of 11 novels, including
Hello to the Cannibals
,
Thanksgiving Night
and
The Last Good Time
(which was made into a film by actor/director Bob Balaban), and several collections of short stories.  He is a celebrated master of the short-story form, and his work has been widely anthologized.  His stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire
and many other magazines.

His honors include two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.