Tuesday, November 11

7:30 - 10:00 pm

Location:  TBA

PaLA is pleased to welcome Mary Doria Russell as the 2008 Annual Awards Banquet Speaker:

MARY DORIA RUSSELL was born in suburban Chicago in 1950. Her mother was a Navy nurse and her father was a Marine Corps drill sergeant. She and her younger brother Richard consequently developed a dismaying vocabulary at an early age. She learned discretion at Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school; how to diagram sentences at Glenbard East High; cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois; social anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston; and biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Russell taught human gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s, but left Academe to write full time. This turned out to be a good career move. Russell's work has been recognized with nine national and international literary awards; she was a finalist for a number of others. The Sparrow and Children of God remain steady sellers, translated into a dozen languages. In 2005, A Thread of Grace was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Her new novel, Dreamers of the Day, is about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference when a handful of British diplomats, oil executives and military men invented the modern Middle East. As Mary says, "It's their world. We just live in it."

After two science fiction novels followed by two 20th-century historical novels, Mary is now writing a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878—a genre two-fer featuring Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the great vaudevillian Eddie Foy. She has recently collaborated with the poet Gary C. Wilkens on the libretto for an opera by the Puerto Rican composer Raymond Torres-Santos, which will be based on her first two novels, The Sparrow and Children of God. The Sparrow is also under option by Warner Brothers for a film starring Brad Pitt and has inspired a completed rock opera by the progressive rock quintet Metaphor.

Mary and Don Russell have been happily married for an unusually high percentage of the years since 1970. Don is a software engineer and one of the founders of AllTech Medical Systems, which designs and manufactures medical imaging equipment. Their son Daniel was born in Zagreb in 1985, and is a senior in Columbia College of Chicago's film production program. Dan is concentrating on writing, film-editing and cinematography, and has interned at Loyola Productions, a Jesuit film company at Loyola Marymount University in L.A.

The Russells live in Cleveland, Ohio, with a huge golden retriever named Leo Lebowski and a dachshund named Annie Fannie Sweet Feet. Annie is the model for the fictional Rosie in Dreamers of the Day, which Mary shamelessly claims "includes the finest portrait of a 16-pound black and tan long-haired dachshund in modern American literature."

For photos and more information, visit http://www.marydoriarussell.info/.