Author Wally Lamb is Skeggs lecturer

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Wally Lamb, author of four New York Times best-selling novels, will present the Youngstown State University Skeggs Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22 at Stambaugh Auditorium.

The lecture is free, but tickets are mandatory, and seating is first-come, first-served. Tickets are available at the Stambaugh Auditorium Box Office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. For information, call the YSU Office of Alumni and Events at 330-941-3497.

Lamb was twice selected for Oprah’s Book Club. He is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters” and “I’ll Fly Away,” collections of autobiographical essays, which evolved from a writing workshop that he facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women.

Lamb has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer at York since 1999, and his work there was the focus of a 2004 segment on “60 Minutes.”

Among his honors is a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award and The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks To Teachers” award.

Lamb has received distinguished alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction.

His book, “I Know This Much is True,” won the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness.

“She’s Come Undone” was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992.

Lamb is a Connecticut native who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a master of fine arts in writing from Vermont College. He and his wife, Christine, live in northeastern Connecticut and have three sons.