Your Lewis & Clark Library is Hosting Keynote Speaker Jay Jennings to Kick off The Big Read Under The Big Sky
September 29, 2015 (Helena, MT)—Your Lewis & Clark Library is kicking off a month long celebration of Charles Portis’ True Grit with Portis Scholar and Keynote Speaker, Jay Jennings. Jennings will discuss the work and life of Charles Portis at 7PM on Thursday October 1st.
Jay Jennings has known Mr. Portis for 30 years and will discuss Portis’ early life in Arkansas; his time in the Marines; and his journalism career in New York and London, before he started his career as a novelist. Jennings will explain the origins of True Grit in history, the landscape in Arkansas and Oklahoma where it takes place, and the making of both films.
Jennings is a fiction writer, journalist, and humorist, whose stories have appeared in many national literary journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Sport Literate, Elysian Fields Quarterly, the Lowbrow Reader, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and Travel & Leisure. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Books” section. He is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow in fiction and a winner of a fiction grant from the Arkansas Arts Council for a novel-in-progress.
His nonfiction book Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City was published by Rodale in 2010 and named an Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Most recently, he edited and wrote the introduction to Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, published in hardcover in 2012 by Butler Center Books and in paperback by Overlook in 2013.
He began his writing career as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, followed by four years as features editor at Tennis magazine. While at the latter, he edited an acclaimed anthology of short stories and poetry called Tennis and the Meaning of Life: A Literary Anthology of the Game (Breakaway Books, 1999), which the New Yorker called “a delight—and perhaps a surprise—to those who know and care about literature.” His work has been recognized by The Best American Sports Writing annual and has appeared in the humor anthology Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor.
A program of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Managed by Arts Midwest, this initiative offers grants to support innovative community reading programs designed around a single book.
Your Lewis & Clark Library is one of 75 communities nationwide participating in The Big Read from September 2015-June 2016. During October our community will celebrate Charles Portis’ True Grit with a full calendar of events.
For more information on this event and a complete calendar of events, visit www.lclibrary.org.
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