SOAL: Sam Anderson, NYTimes Columnist and Critic at Large

• September 21, 2011

Southern Oregon Arts & Lectures wraps up its 2011 season series with a presentation by New York Times columnist and Critic at Large, Sam Anderson. In a recent New York Times essay, Anderson indicated that he “tends to shy away from big, sweeping, era-defining statements.” So SOAL has asked Anderson to throw caution to the wind and tackle this very topic in an evening that promises to be significant and serious punctuated by humor and hijinks. Anderson will speak on Thursday, September 29th at 7:30 pm at North Medford High School Auditorium.

Although he lives in New York, Anderson’s roots are in Oregon. He was born in Eugene and went to college in Ashland, where his writing career began at The Siskiyou, the student newspaper of Southern Oregon University. (In 1997, the Oregon Newspapers Publishers Association awarded him “Best Columnist” for his work there.) After college, Anderson went on to write for a wide variety of national publications, including Slate, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, New York Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review.

Anderson’s work is known for its humor and critical intelligence, as well as for its unusually wide range of subject matter from books to baseball to politics to comedy. He has written about Don DeLillo, Richard Pryor, Harry Potter, James Joyce, the rhetoric of Obama, the problem of information overload, the mysterious career of James Franco, why criticism matters and the pleasures of hating Kobe Bryant. (Anderson is a devout Portland TrailBlazers fan.)

His work has been featured on NPR and in “The Best Technology Writing 2010.” He has also performed live comedy at the Museum of Modern Art.

He posts the best sentence he reads every day at twitter.com/shamblanderson.

Event Location:

North Medford High School Auditorium

1900 N. Keene Way Drive

Medford, OR 97504

Event Contact Information:

Shelley Austin, Executive Director

Jackson County Library Foundation

541.774.6572

shelley@jclf.org

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