Acclaimed novelist to speak at PSU

  Wednesday, February 5, 2014 2:00 AM
  News

Pittsburg, KS

Novelist Larry Heinemann, whose work is some of the most acclaimed dealing with the Vietnam War, will speak and read from his work at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6, in the Governors Room of Pittsburg State University’s Overman Student Center. Heinemann’s presentation is part of PSU’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Heinemann, born in Chicago in 1944, served a combat tour in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division. He has described himself as the most ordinary of soldiers, but his work is anything but ordinary.

“Close Quarters,” his award-winning first novel, has been called the seminal work to come out the war in Vietnam. “Paco’s Story,” his second novel, received the National Book Award for Fiction and the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award, among others. “Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam,” a memoir and the third book of his Vietnam trilogy, was published in 2005.

Heinemann's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, GRAPHIS, Harper’s, and Tri-Quarterly magazines as well as the Vietnam Writers Association Journal of Arts and Letters, and numerous anthologies. He has received literature fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Scholarship Program. He is currently at work on anthology of Vietnamese folktales and a novel about the Chicago Fire of 1871 titled “Incident at Clark Street Bridge.”

Heinemann is currently the visiting writer-in-residence at Texas A&M University.

The PSU Visiting Writers Series is supported by the PSU Department of English and the PSU Student Fee Council.