Russell Banks

Guest of the Corpus Christi Reading Series in the Spring of 2002

Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. The eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class, hardscrabble world that has played a major role in shaping his writing. Mr. Banks attended Colgate University, and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before he could support himself as a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing, and as a shoe salesman and window trimmer. More recently, he has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, University of New Hampshire, New England College, New York University and Princeton University. Russell Banks is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters. Through a dozen novels and short story collections that have won him Guggenheim and NEA grants and a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction, Banks has made a life's work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things "normal" men can and will do. He writes with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat through the misadventures and outright tragedies in his books.

– compiled from various promotional materials and book reviews.

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Writings

(With William Matthews and Newton Smith) 15 Poems, Lillabulero Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1967. Waiting to Freeze, Lillabulero Press (Northwood Narrows, NH), 1969. 30/6 (poems), Quest (New York City), 1969. Snow: Meditations of a Cautious Man in Winter, Granite Press (Hanover, NH), 1974. Searching for Survivors, Fiction Collective (New York City), 1975. Family Life, Avon (New York City), 1975, revised edition, Sun & Moon (Los Angeles), 1988. The New World (stories), University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1978. Hamilton Stark (novel), Houghton (Boston), 1978. The Book of Jamaica (novel), Houghton, 1980. Trailerpark (stories), Houghton, 1981. (With others) Antaeus, No. 45-56: The Autobiographical Eye, Ecco (New York City), 1982. The Relation of My Imprisonment (novel), Sun & Moon (College Park, MD), 1984. Continental Drift (novel), Harper (New York City), Hamish Hamilton (London), 1985. Success Stories, Harper, 1986. Affliction, Harper, 1990. The Sweet Hereafter, Harper Collins (New York City), 1992. Rule of the Bone, Harper Collins, 1996. Trailerpark, Harper Collins, 1996. Hamilton Stark, Harper Collins, 1996. Cloudsplitter, Harper Collins, 1998. (With Arturo Patten) The Invisible Stranger: The Patten, Maine, Photographs of Arturo Patten, Harper Collins, 1999. The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks, Harper Collins, 2000.

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Awards/Honors

Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merril Award, the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Continental Drift was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and Affliction was short-listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize. In early 2001, Russell Banks was elected as President of The International Parliament of Writers, following Wole Soyinka and Salman Rushdie.