Join us Friday, March 17, 2023, at 2:00 pm in the Tony Galines Meeting Room with author John Griswold. He will speak about his 2009 book Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City that is considered a great treatise on happenings in Herrin, IL during the l920’s at a special Guest Lecture Program. It is a comprehensive history of this American city, a place that in its time became not just a melting pot, but a caldron.

John Griswold, a Herrin native, is a staff writer at the Common Reader: A Journal of the Essay, at Washington University in St. Louis. His first collection of essays, “Pirates You Don’t Know, And Other Adventures in the Examined Life,” made “Best Of” lists in the Chicago Tribune, Entropy, and Essay Daily. His second collection of essays, “The Age of Clear Profit,” was published in fall 2022. Both are from University of Georgia Press.

He is also the author of the novel A Democracy of Ghosts, a Foreword Magazine book of the year, and the narrative nonfiction Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City. For these books, Southern Illinois University awarded him their Delta Award for “writing with distinction,” an award previously given to Herrin native, Robert Coover, Dick Gregory, and Senator Paul Simon.

Griswold wrote extensively (as Oronte Churm) at Inside Higher Ed and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His essays and stories have appeared in journals such as Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Natural Bridge, and in the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction, Best American Sports Writing, and Mountain Man Dance Moves (Vintage), with notable essays listed in Best American Non-required Reading and Best American Essays.

He was also the founding Series Editor for Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction, a book series at University of Georgia Press; a university professor; and a US Army deep-sea diver. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is a l981 graduate of Herrin High School. He lives in the St. Louis metro area.

The event is Free & Open to the Public.