An Evening with Jennifer Egan

The Department of English and the Esther Freier Lectures in Literature are delighted to present author Jennifer Egan reading and discussing her work. Egan's new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, will be published on April 5.

Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America.

This event is free and open to the public. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email sutt0063@umn.edu or call 612-626-1528.

Department of English events follow University of Minnesota COVID-19 protocols. Staff and visitors attending in-person events are asked to self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms using the Stay Safe MN Health Screening Checklist. Staff and visitors are reminded to wash hands often, get tested, and stay home when ill or exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19.

The Esther Freier Endowed Lectures in Literature began in 2001, after clinical laboratory chemist and professor Esther Freier created an endowment to bring prize-winning national and international authors to campus for free public lectures and informal visits with students. Freier had a deep and profound love for literature and the humanities and sought to leave a legacy that would benefit the public and inspire emerging writers. The series hosts two free lectures each year featuring various prize-winning authors, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to David Mitchell, Louise Glück to Claudia Rankine.