Brooklyn Voices Presents the First Annual Gilbert Sorrentino Birthday Tribute

April 15, 2015

BROOKLYN, N.Y. – April 15, 2015 – St. Joseph’s College (SJC), in partnership with Greenlight Bookstore, is pleased to announce that it will hold the First Annual Gilbert Sorrentino Birthday Tribute on Monday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the Tuohy Hall Auditorium on the College’s Brooklyn Campus as part of the spring Brooklyn Voices lecture series.

At this event, several distinguished authors with ties to Brooklyn celebrate Sorrentino’s birthday with a reading and discussion of his work, including Mark Chiusano, Joshua Cohen, Don DeLillo, Sam Lipsyte, Gilbert Sorrentino’s son, Christopher and journalist James Walcott, cultural critic for Vanity Fair. The program will be hosted by Doubleday Broadway Executive Editor Gerald Howard, a fellow Bay Ridge Brooklynite, and a friend and fan of Sorrentino. The program will be followed by refreshments, books by Sorrentino and the featured authors will be accessible.

“Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the truly great Brooklyn literary figures,” said Dr. Ted Hamm, chair of the Department of Journalism and New Media Studies at SJC. “The roster of notables coming to SJC to celebrate his life and legacy illustrates his stature as a true writer's writer."

Author Gilbert Sorrentino (1929 –2006) grew up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn and returned there after a distinguished career in academia and the arts, where he pushed structural and stylistic boundaries with his fiction and poetry. His honors included two Guggenheim Fellowships in Fiction in 1973 and 1987, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 1981, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1985 and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992.Sorrentino's influence continues to be felt among contemporary writers.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Michael Banach at 718.940.5584 or [email protected].

ABOUT BROOKLYN VOICES
Created in collaboration with Greenlight Bookstore, the aim of the Brooklyn Voices series is to promote and enhance the creative vitality of our home neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill by providing local writers, artists and intellectuals with a forum in which to discuss and present their works to our neighbors, patrons and students. Through lectures, forums, performances and public discussion, Brooklyn Voices seeks to make a meaningful contribution to the thriving intellectual culture of the neighborhood and ensure that our community remains a stimulating place in which to live, learn and do business.

ABOUT ST. JOSEPH'S COLLEGE
St. Joseph’s College has been dedicated to providing a diverse population of students in the New York metropolitan area with an affordable education rooted in the liberal arts tradition since 1916. Independent and coeducational, the College provides a strong academic and value-oriented education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, aiming to prepare each student for a life characterized by integrity, intellectual and spiritual values, social responsibility and service. With campuses located in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn and in Patchogue, Long Island, the College offers degrees in more than 35 majors, special course offerings and certificates, affiliated and pre-professional programs through its School of Arts and Sciences and its School of Professional and Graduate Studies.