NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Madison Smartt Bell, a Middle Tennessee native who recently published the last of a trilogy of novels about the Haitian revolution, will read at Vanderbilt University from his book The Stone That the Builder Refused.
Bell will appear at 4:10 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, in Room 126 of Wilson Hall on the Vanderbilt campus. There will be a book signing and reception after the reading.
All events are free and open to the public.
The reading is part of a series of programs at Vanderbilt marking the 200th anniversary of the creation of Haiti, the first free black republic in the western hemisphere.
All Soul’s Rising, the first book in the Haiti trilogy, won the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Anisfeld-Wolf Award for best book of 1996 dealing with race, and was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. Master of the Crossroads was published in 2001, followed this year by The Stone That the Builder Refused.
The carefully researched trilogy draws on Bell’s expertise with the Parisian and Haitian archives and people, and his mastery of French and Creole.
"What Bell has given us Ö isn’t just a single picture," wrote Michael Pye in the New York Times review of The Stone That the Builder Refused.. "It’s a somber hall of narrative, full of dreams and horrors. It draws you along like any authentic history, day by terrible day, nerve ends raw because you have no sense of an author ready to intervene and save his characters."
Bell is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Goucher College in Baltimore. In addition to novels, he has published two collections of short stories and a writing primer, written screenplays and released a music CD. He was raised in Brentwood, Tenn.
Bell’s reading is sponsored by the University Lectures Committee, English Department, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Department of History, and Center for Latin America and Iberian Studies.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu