October 12, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, will hold an on stage conversation with writer David L. Ulin at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Alice Sebold
• In a Conversation with David L. Ulin
• Alice Sebold is the author of the best-selling novel The Lovely Bones and the acclaimed memoir Lucky
• Alice Sebold is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the UCSB College of Creative Studies
• Thursday, November 18
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $15 / UCSB students $10
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Alice Sebold, whose novel The Lovely Bones was celebrated for its astonishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers, will take part in a fascinating on stage conversation with writer David L. Ulin, a contributor to the L.A. Weekly and the author of The Myth of Solid Ground, on Thursday, November 18 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Sebold is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the UCSB College of Creative Studies.

Sebold’s best-selling novel The Lovely Bones won the American Booksellers Associations’ “Book of the Year” Award in 2002. Narrated from the perspective of a teenage girl in heaven following her own brutal murder, The Lovely Bones follows this unbearable tragedy and transforms into a suspenseful, touching, even funny novel about family, memory, love, heaven and living. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote, “A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time....A deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed—slowly, grudgingly and in fragments—through love and acceptance....Ms. Sebold’s achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family.”

Sebold is also the author of the best-selling memoir Lucky, which recounts her rape at the age of eighteen and the court trial that followed it. Sebold wrote the memoir after beginning work on The Lovely Bones, for as she has explained in an interview on Powells.com, “As weird as this sounds, I think that after writing the first chapter of Lovely Bones, in which Susie is raped and killed, there was some urging on Susie’s part that I get my own business out of the way before writing further into her story. When I say ‘on Susie’s part’ I mean: the demands of her wanting to tell her story and using me to do so meant that I had to unload my story someplace else. It wasn’t going to fit into the book I wanted to write for her.” Reviewing the book for Elle, novelist Francine Prose claimed, “It’s hard to believe that a book about brutal rape and its aftermath could actually be inspirational. But despite its disturbing subject, Lucky is exhilarating to read.”

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Sebold’s family moved to the suburbs northwest of Philadelphia when she was still young and she spent the remainder of her childhood there. She attended Syracuse University and the University of Houston, later returning to school in her 30s for an MFA from UC Irvine. In the years between her one-year stint in Houston as a graduate student in poetry and the publication of her first book when she was 36, she lived and worked in New York in a variety of part-time jobs. She credits the returning women students she taught composition to at Hunter College with inspiring her to go back to school herself. She lives in California with her husband, author Glen David Gold (Carter Beats the Devil).

David L. Ulin is the author of the recently published The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, a fascinating exploration of seismology that also focuses on the blurry line between belief and science. Booklist writes, “Ulin takes a fresh and fluently metaphorical, mythological and personal approach to earthquakes and our attempts to predict them in a book that echoes John McPhee’s observational acuity and Joan Didion’s dark vision. That said, Ulin’s volatile combination of rarefied thought and gut reaction is uniquely his own.” Ulin is also editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly and has written for GQ, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly and the Chicago Tribune.

Courtesy of Borders, books by Alice Sebold and David L. Ulin will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Alice Sebold is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the UCSB College of Creative Studies. Tickets for the event are $15 for the general public and $10 for UCSB students. They are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.