• When: Monday October 15, 2007 at 8 PM

• Where: Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher College

• How: Event is free but reservations should be made by calling 410-337-6333

• Also: Goucher's Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Kratz Center are pleased to co-sponsor an informal chat with Mr. Jones from 3:30-5 PM in the Soper Room of the Julia Rogers Library.

About Edward P. Jones:

Born in 1951 and raised in Washington, D.C., Edward P. Jones stands as one of the most consistently groundbreaking novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. His richly textured and unflinchingly honest depiction of his character's struggles is as exacting as the early stories of James Joyce.

A New York Times bestselling author, Mr. Jones was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Known World.  The novel was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

Educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia, Mr. Jones won both the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Foundation Grant for his first book, Lost in the City, a collection of short stories on the African American working class of the 20th century Washington, D.C. The collection was also short-listed for the National Book Award.

Mr. Jones has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; and he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004.

Mr. Jones' third book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was published in 2006. Like Lost in the City it is a collection of short stories that deal with the African American working class of 20th century Washington, D.C. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine.

Of The Known World, Regina Marler said the following:

Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.