The Southampton Review Honors Frank McCourt, Award-Winning Writer, Teacher, Humanitarian

SOUTHAMPTON, NY - The Southampton Review (TSR), the literary magazine published by Stony Brook Southampton's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Program in Literature and Creative Writing, will honor the late Frank McCourt, the bestselling author and longtime faculty member who passed away on July 19, 2009.

Volume III of TSR was made available on July 15 to inaugurate the MFA Program's annual summer Writers Conference, held from July 15 through July 26. 

“Storytelling is teaching.” -Frank McCourt

The launch of the latest issue will be a celebration of Mr. McCourt's writing, teaching, and joie de vivre. The featured reader, former Poet Laureate of the United States and MFA faculty member Billy Collins, will join Roger Rosenblatt, Robert Reeves, Lou Ann Walker, and many others for an evening of readings, reminiscences, literature, tears, and laughter. The event will take place on Friday evening, July 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the beautifully restored Avram Theater on campus.

Read the NPR story on Frank McCourt

In honoring Mr. McCourt, Robert Reeves, founder and director of the MFA Program recently said, "On a faculty with Nobel Laureates, Poet Laureates, winners of Pulitzers, Emmys and Oscars, only Frank’s readings would fill football stadiums.  He was our rock star."

Frank McCourt turned the odds of a difficult childhood in his favor, finding riches in poverty, family, immigration and teaching. He wrote Angela's Ashes in 1996, at the age of 60, defying F. Scott Fitzgerald's edict that "there are no second acts in American lives."

He received the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Circle Award (1996) for his first effort, followed by ‘Tis (1999), Teacher Man (2005) and Angela and the Baby Jesus (2007). As Anne Bancroft said to Alan Alda, as they sat side-by-side in his celebrated memoirist class, "Where else would you want to be on a summer afternoon?"

McCourt was a member of the MFA faculty for almost a decade. "With this issue of The Southampton Review, we hope to set a new standard for the ‘Mention McCourt’ tradition," says Mr. Reeves. "No one's quite sure how this came about, but at every public gathering, lecture, reading and theater event, we always shoehorn in a reference to Frank. Even our editor-in-chief Lou Ann Walker has put together an extraordinary journal that relentlessly mentions McCourt no less than 300 times."
 
Readers will find W.S. Merwin's essay Listening to Frank, Terence Moran's First Friday Club, which included Jimmy Breslin, William Kennedy and Frank McCourt, Clark Blaise's Smudges on the Photographs: The Memoirs of Frank McCourt, and Malachy and Alphie McCourt's essays. There is even a Frank McCourt Quiz, "Everything You Think You Know about Frank" by Christian McLean, a flock of quotes, "The Wit and Wisdom of Frank McCourt" and a cartoon image of Frank McCourt by Jules Feiffer.

In addition, there are essays by Roger Rosenblatt, Distinguished Professor at SUNY, Anne Taylor Fleming, Susan Ann Gilman, Nicholas Sopkin and Helen Simonson, a recent MFA Graduate who will publish her first novel with Random House. TSR  III includes poetry from Grace Schulman, Julie Sheehan, award-winning poet and MFA faculty, Alexandra van de Camp, Jay Rubin, Tara Propper, Michelle Whittaker, Patricia Spears Jones and Robert Thomas. Additional contributors are Melissa Bank (Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing), cartoonists Liza Donnelly (New Yorker) and Michael Maslin, artists Amy Portnoy (The New York Times) Gregory de la Haba and Arnold Roth.  Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling tackle the writer’s craft, in "How to Write."

The Southampton Review was first published in 2007. A natural offspring of Southampton’s MFA Program and Writers Conference, TSR places the works of established and emerging writers side-by-side, nurturing new talent. 

For information about the Writers Conference and the Gala TSR Launch, please call (631) 632-5030.

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