Words & Music Welcomes Back Roy Blount Jr.
If you caught Roy’s guest appearance on HBO’s new hit series Treme this week, you’ve probably already decided he’s a guy you want to know… You’d be right.
Roy Blount Jr., a winner of the Faulkner Society’s annual ALIHOT Award (A Legend in His/Her Own Time) for Literature, is a frequent member of the Words & Music faculty, and has judged categories of the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
He is the prolific author of 22 books covering a gorgeous range of topic, from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking. The most recent, Alphabet Juice (Farrar, Straus), is now out in paperback also available as an audiobook.
Roy is the president of the Authors Guild, a member of PEN and the Fellowship of Southern Authors, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, a Boston Public Library Literary Light, a usage consultant to the American Heritage Dictionary, and an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders. He hails from Decatur, GA and lives in western Massachusetts. In October he received the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of North Carolina.
His first book, about hanging out with the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy…And the Load Filled Up, now available from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was named one of the ten best sports books ever by Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post –and just recently called, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, “the best of all books about pro football.”
Norman Mailer said of his second book, Crackers, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time,” and Time placed Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H.L. Mencken and W.C. Fields.” Garrison Keillor said in The Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth and soulful all in one sentence.” Playboy said he was, “known to the critics as our next Mark Twain.”
To learn more (lots more) about this true legend in his own time, CLICK HERE.
To learn more about this year’s Words & Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans, CLICK HERE!
