“Inspirations: A Yaddo Gay Pride Event Celebrating Our LGBT Writers” will be moderated by author Allan Gurganus, who has enjoyed many working residencies at Yaddo, dating back to 1975, and who also is a Member of The Corporation of Yaddo. 

Fellow former residents and writers Cris Beam and Jorge Cortinas will join Gurganus for a lively discussion about Yaddo’s past, present, and future role in the LGBT literary community, and each of the panelists will offer a reading. 

ABOUT ALLAN GURGANUS

Allan Gurganus’s novels, stories and essays stand as a singularly unified and living body of work. Known for their dark humor, erotic candor and folkloric sweep, his tales are now widely available in English and translation. Paris’s La Monde called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.” 

Since his first publication thirty years ago, fiction by Gurganus has inspired the greatest loyalty of all -- re-reading. The number of new critical works, plays and film based upon his fiction argue its urgent, central role. Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, has called Gurganus “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty.” In a culture where familiar branding is all-important, Gurganus has resisted franchised repetition. His books differ widely. He continues to startle and grow on the page. 

Gurganus’s first published story “Minor Heroism” appeared in the New Yorker when he was twenty six. In 1974, this tale offered the first gay character that magazine had ever presented. After seven years in composition, Gurganus presented 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). His first book, it spent eight months on the New York Times bestseller list; it became the subject of a New Yorker cartoon and remains a clue on “Jeopardy” (Names for four hundred). The novel has been translated into twelve languages and has sold over two million copies. The CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland and Diane Lane, won four Emmy awards including Best Supporting Actress for Cecily Tyson as the freed slave, Castalia. Gurganus’s novella, Blessed Assurance has become part of the Harvard Business School’s Ethics curriculum. The work is discussed at length in Questions of Character (Harvard Business School Press) by Joseph L. Badaracco. 

Allan Gurganus is a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He plans to complete a group of long stories Saint Everybody and the novel, Promise (N.C.). Gurganus’s published works include a collection of stories and novellas, White People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist) and the novel Plays Well With Others. His latest book is The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). Gurganus’s short fiction appears in The New Yorker, Harper’s and other magazines. His stories have honored by the O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Best New Stories of the South. He will edit the 2006 version of this last anthology, becoming the first writer-judge to replace its twenty-year editor, Shannon Ravenel. 

Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1947 to a teacher and businessman, Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections. Gurganus has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During a three-year stint onboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. Gurganus subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he worked with Grace Paley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Mr. Gurganus has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Duke, Sarah Lawrence, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His former students include the novelists Ann Patchett, Elizabeth McCracken and Donald Antrim among many others. Gurganus was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. Returned from Manhattan fourteen years ago to live in his native North Carolina, Gurganus co-founded “Writers Against Jesse Helms.” He continues to be an eloquent critic of homophobia, racism and America’s imperial foreign policy under the Bush administration. Gurganus’s political editorials often appear in The New York Times.

Allan Gurganus’s novel-in-progress will be second in The Falls Trilogy that commenced with Widow. It is The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina, rising at six A.M to write and garden daily. He told a recent interviewer, “Novelists don’t really start life till turning forty. By that measure, as an artist, I am just eighteen. I have only just begun…”

ABOUT CRIS BEAM

Cris Beam is an author and professor in New York City. She is the author of Transparent (Harcourt 2007), a nonfiction book that covers seven years in the lives of four transgender teenagers, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best transgender book in 2008, and was a Stonewall Honor book. Her young adult novel, I am J, was released by Little, Brown in March 2011, and her memoir, Mother, Stranger was published by The Atavist and quickly reached the top ten on Kindle Singles. She's currently working on a nonfiction book about the state of foster care in the U.S. which will be released by Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt in 2013. Cris teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the Point Foundation and the Corporation of Yaddo.

ABOUT JORGE CORTINAS

Jorge Cortinas’ many awards include the Helen Merrill Award; the Robert Chesley Award; "playwright of the year" in El Nuevo Herald's year-end list; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the California Arts Council, among others. His plays include Maleta Mulata (1998; Campo Santo, San Francisco), Look! A Latino (2004; Ma-Yi, New York; 2009, Great Short Plays, Playscripts), and Sleepwalkers (1999; Area Stage, Miami; 2002; Alliance Theatre, Atlanta), which won the Carbonell Award. Blind Mouth Singing completed runs at Chicago's Teatro Vista, and the New York-based National Asian American Theatre Company. He has received commissions from South Coast Repertory, the Mark Taper, Hartford Stage and New World Theater. He is on the faculty at Lehigh University, and is a member of New Dramatists. He is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop and a member of the Playwrights Coalition at MCC. Jorge is also an accomplished writer of fiction, for which he has been awarded the Beth Lisa Feldman Prize, the James Assatly Memorial Prize, and first prize in the Fiction Contest of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Before he began writing, Jorge worked for years as a full-time advocate seeking to advance an array of progressive causes, both nationally and internationally. Among the groups he worked with was the Coalition for Immigrant Rights, ACT-UP, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.

ABOUT YADDO 

Since opening its doors in 1926, Yaddo has welcomed more than 6,000 artists, many of whom, whether they knew it or not, were articulating the heart and soul of what would become the gay community. Today, Yaddo continues to support artists across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

The program is organized by Jaime Wolf, a Director of The Corporation of Yaddo, with support from the Center. 

ABOUT THE SECOND TUESDAY LECTURE SERIES AND THE LGBT CENTER

The Second Tuesday Lecture Series is the longest running program at the LGBT Center. Since 1985, more than 140 speakers have made presentations in the arts, academia, and politics. Speakers representing every major cultural award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Grammy Award, the Academy Award (The Oscars), Broadway's Tony Awards, the Lambda Literary Award, and the National Book Award, as well as the UK Booker Literary Award, have made presentations. Through this program, Larry Kramer spoke about the plight of the AIDS Crisis in March 1987, thus beginning ACT-UP, the largest direct action AIDS organization in the world.

Located at 208 West 13th Street in NYC, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center provides a home for more than 300 queer groups of all types.