(WASHINGTON, NJ) -- The Warren Community College Visiting Authors Series resumes on Thursday, October 28, with an online reading by internationally-celebrated fiction writer Wally Lamb. The event begins at 7:30pm. Lamb is the author of six New York Times best-selling novels: I'll Take You There; We Are Water; Wishin' and Hopin'; The Hour I First Believed; I Know This Much is True; and She's Come Undone.
His first two novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and a featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into 18 languages. Lamb and Mark Ruffalo developed I Know This Much is True into a hit, critically-acclaimed, multi-award-winning HBO limited series starring Ruffalo as twins from the novel. Ruffalo won the Emmy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice, Satellite and TCA awards for outstanding actor.
Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters and I’ll Fly Away, collections of autobiographical essays by inmates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. His work as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer at York was the focus of a 2004 segment on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes.
Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my characters’ lives don’t much resemble my own, what we share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the lives of others. That’s also why I teach. As challenging as it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching are, for me, intertwined.”
Honors for Lamb include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks To Teachers” award, and the 2010 Arts and Letters award from the YMCA of New York City. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He is a recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She’s Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992. I’ll Fly Away was a 2008 Connecticut Book Award Winner for non-fiction.
To attend the reading, please click here. After the simple registration process, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about attending the virtual reading.
The Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Division of Cultural & Heritage Affairs. All physical site facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpretation for any VAS event is available with two weeks’ notice.
Warren Community College is located at 475 Route 57 West in Washington, Warren County. It offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and a member program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
