Canisius College Contemporary Writers Series welcomes award-winning author Mary Karr

The Canisius College Contemporary Writers Series will welcome award-winning author Mary Karr on Tuesday, Oct. 5. Karr is the author of three bestselling memoirs: “The Liar’s Club,” “Cherry” and “Lit.”

She also penned five volumes of poetry, most recently “Tropic of Squalor.” Karr will speak at 7 p.m. in the Montante Cultural Center. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The event will also be livestreamed.

Mary Karr was born and raised in East Texas and attended Macalester College and Goddard College. She is a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, winner of Whiting Writer’s Award, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and an NEA grant. She is currently the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Karr rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her memoir, “The Liar’s Club,” which documented her Texas childhood. The book won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Liar’s Club rode high on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, becoming an annual “best book” for The Times, as well as The New Yorker, People and Time.

Karr followed up “The Liar’s Club” with two more bestselling memoirs, “Cherry,” in which she recounts her tumultuous teenage years, and “Lit,” the story of her battle with alcoholism. In 2015, Karr released the bestselling “The Art of Memoir,” in which she speaks of her expertise as a professor, a therapy patient, writer, spiritual seeker and recovering alcoholic. Her unique insight and experience provide her art with a masterful perspective.

Founded with a grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation and continued through the Peter Teaching

Professorship Program, the Contemporary Writers Series is generously supported today by the Hassett, Scoma and Lowery Endowments and with the cooperation of The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Center for Urban Education and Talking Leaves Books.

For more information on the event or to watch the livestream of the event, contact Mick Cochrane,

coordinator of the Contemporary Writers Series, at 716-888-2662 or cochrane@canisius.edu. Visit http://www.canisius.edu/150 for more information about Canisius’ milestones and celebratory events.