It is a great honor to welcome Vermont-Based Author (and Dartmouth Professor) Peter Orner to the Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library on Thursday August 8 at 6:00 pm.

Mr. Orner will be here for a special tribute to help us honor and celebrate our dear friend – Thomas Staley, who died in 2022.  Dr. Staley, the Director of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, was well known for acquiring the papers of a host of literary lions (James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and of Woodward and Bernstein to boot.  A special reception with light refreshments will follow the discussion.

Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of two novels published by Little, Brown: The second coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and three story collections:  Esther Stories, Last car over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s essay collection/memoir, Am I alone here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Peter’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan, Northeastern University School of Law, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Peter is also a former member of the Bolinas, California Volunteer Fire Department in Bolinas, California and current member of the Norwich Fire Department, Norwich, Vermont. Peter holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, and lives with his family in Norwich.

Copies of the book, Am I alone here? will be for sale and signing after the event.

We want to thank the family of Paul Mahoney for sponsoring this very special tribute to Dr. Tom Staley.  For more information, please call 967-2778.  The Library is located at 18 Maine Street, Kennebunkport, Maine.  Parking is available at Consolidated School, 25 School Street, Maine Street, or the Village Fire Station Lot, North Street.