Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and educator Jane Smiley will speak to approximately 200 graduating seniors at the 61传媒 1999 Commencement on Sunday, May 16, at 3 p.m., on the campus’s Elm Tree Lawn.
Smiley is the author of A Thousand Acres, her 1992 novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was made into a major motion picture. Heralded for the moral complexity of her themes and her keen insight into human nature, Smiley, says The New York Times, is “fast becoming the Balzac of the late 20th century American Midwest.”
Smiley is currently a Distinguished Professor at Iowa State University, where since 1981 she has taught creative writing and literature. Previously, she taught at the University of Iowa in the Writer’s Workshop and Core Literature Program. She has a B.A. from Vassar College, and M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
Smiley was born in Los Angeles and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in a family where gossip and storytelling were the favorite pastimes. “All we talked about was family history—who did what and why they did it. I am totally fascinated by people,” she said.
In A Thousand Acres, Smiley combines several related ideas and elements: big, industrial American farms; relationships within a dysfunctional family; the link between the exploitation of the environment and of women; and King Lear. Smiley describes the work of bringing these disparate elements together into a gripping narrative as “like lifting a heavy stone, carrying it forward two steps, and dropping it. It was exhausting.”
Her most recent novel, Moo, is a dark comedy about academia and society. A review in Publishers Weekly says, “Smiley delivers…a satire of university life that leaves no aspect of contemporary academia unscathed.”
She is the author of several other acclaimed works of fiction, including the Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Barn Blind, Duplicate Keys, and Ordinary Love & Good Will; numerous magazine articles, and other works of non-fiction. She is the recipient of The O’Henry Award for the Best American Short Stories for “Lily,” published July 1984 in the Atlantic, and for “The Pleasure of Her Company,” March 1981 in Mademoiselle.