Writer Chris Offutt will be the featured literary guest at this year’s Thacker Mountain in the Delta broadcast on Saturday, March 31 at 3 p.m. in Studio A of the Delta Music Institute on the campus of Delta State University. The award-winning radio show is visiting the Delta as part the fourth anniversary celebration of the DMI, Delta State’s music industry studies program.
Offutt grew up in a small former mining community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. He attended Morehead State University and graduated with a degree in theater and a minor in English before hitchhiking around the country, holding more than 50 jobs, all part-time. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 1992, he published a short story collection, Kentucky Straight. His second book was the memoir The Same River Twice, and in 1997 he published his first novel, The Good Brother. In 1999, he published his second book of stories, Out of the Woods, followed in 2002 by No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home, about a six-month return home to Rowan County.
His work has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation. Offutt was also named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers by Granta. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Oxford American, and on NPR. His stories are included in many anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, four appearances in New Stories of the South, and twice on Selected Shorts on NPR in New York City. He has also presented more than 100 public readings of his work in the USA and abroad. In 2005, Offutt made his comic book debut when he wrote "Another Man’s Escape" for Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist.
He has written and produced for “True Blood,” “Weeds,” and “Tremé.” He’s also written two pilots, “Tough Trade,” shot on location in Nashville, and “Star Wheel Badge,” for CBS, set in Texas. His screenplays include the produced short The Trapper. He lives in Oxford, Miss. and joined the Department of English at the University of Mississippi in 2011.
The public is encouraged to come be a part of this entertaining broadcast on March 31 at 3 p.m. to support the Delta Music Institute. For more information on the Thacker in the Delta event, please call (662) 846-4579 or visit dmi.deltastate.edu.
