{"id":7877,"date":"2011-09-03T08:00:10","date_gmt":"2011-09-03T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=7877"},"modified":"2011-09-03T01:39:04","modified_gmt":"2011-09-03T06:39:04","slug":"apsu-professors-novel-to-be-on-display-at-library-of-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2011\/09\/03\/apsu-professors-novel-to-be-on-display-at-library-of-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU professor’s novel to be on display at Library of Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – If you\u2019re in Washington, D.C., later this fall and you happen to stop by the Library of Congress to get a look at an early draft of the Declaration of Independence or an original Gutenberg Bible, be sure to keep your eyes out for a copy of \u201cThe Baker\u2019s Boy,\u201d a novel by Austin Peay State University professor Barry Kitterman.<\/p>\n

The book will be on display inside the world\u2019s largest library, with more than 22 million catalogued books, as part of the newly established Peace Corps Writers Collection.<\/p>\n

\"Austin<\/a>

Austin Peay State University professor Barry Kitterman<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 22nd, Kitterman will visit Washington, D.C., for a special Peace Corps Writers Luncheon to celebrate the new collection. The collection was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps and to honor the numerous writers who served as volunteers over the years.<\/p>\n

Kitterman joined the Peace Corps in the late 1970s and worked as a volunteer in Belize. He memorably depicted some of his Peace Corps experiences in the 2008 novel, \u201cThe Baker’s Boy.\u201d The book tells two intertwined stories of Tanner Johnson. The first deals with him as a middle-aged man, so haunted by his past that he flees from his pregnant wife and the stable life he knew. That past informs the second story in the book, which focuses on Johnson’s traumatic struggles and disillusionment 25 years earlier while serving with the Peace Corps in Belize.<\/p>\n

The work struck a cord with many of his fellow returned Peace Corps volunteers, and in 2009, it was awarded the Maria Thomas Fiction Award by the website, www.peacecorpswriters.org<\/a>. The award, named after the late novelist and Peace Corps volunteer Maria Thomas, is given annually to a work of high literary merit. Previous winners include best-selling authors Paul Theroux and Kent Haruf.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn reading Barry Kitterman, I find myself rediscovering the pleasures of reading Dostoyevsky \u2014 admittedly an extravagant claim in response to a first novel,\u201d Ann Neelon, a poet and Murray State University professor wrote in a review of the book for the website. \u201cLike \u2018Crime and Punishment,\u2019 \u2018The Brothers Karamazov,\u2019 \u2018The Idiot\u2019 and\/or \u2018The Possessed,\u2019 \u2018The Baker’s Boy\u2019 constitutes a powerful work of moral imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s inclusion in the new Library of Congress collection is the second bit of good news Kitterman has received this year. In May, Southern Methodist University Press published his second book, \u201cFrom the San Joaquin.\u201d The work is a collection of short stories set in Kitterman\u2019s hometown of Ivanhoe, CA, in the San Joaquin Valley.<\/p>\n

A recent review of the book by Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers, & passersby, said, \u201c In From the San Joaquin Barry Kitterman, an English professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, has created a fine example of the American short-story cycle, the kind of linked collection that Sherwood Anderson pioneered in his masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shortly after Kitterman returns from Washington, D.C., he will give a reading from his new book on October 16th at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville\u2019s War Memorial Plaza. The time of that event will be announced soon.<\/p>\n

For more information on Kitterman or his fiction, contact the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at 931.221.7876.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – If you\u2019re in Washington, D.C., later this fall and you happen to stop by the Library of Congress to get a look at an early draft of the Declaration of Independence or an original Gutenberg Bible, be sure to keep your eyes out for a copy of \u201cThe Baker\u2019s Boy,\u201d a novel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[10265,23,262,2018,825,10262,10263,10266,6540,2873,10264,4118,2279,10267],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-233","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7879,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions\/7879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}