AC’s Creative Mind Lecture features renowned author George Saunders

A renowned and highly decorated Amarillo-born author whose short stories regularly appear in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s Magazine, will headline the 2024 Amarillo College Creative Mind Lecture Series on April 4th.

George Saunders, whose body of work has propelled him to such lofty laurels as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Man Booker Prize and, most recently, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, returns to his roots to headline one of the College’s most popular perennial events.

“George Saunders is considered one of the best story writers in the English language,” said Dr. Chris Hudson, assistant professor of English and director of AC’s Creative Mind Lecture Series. “One way of thinking about Saunders if you haven’t read him is as a contemporary Vonnegut: anger, satire, humor, compassion.

“His ear for the spoken word is the best there is right now,” Hudson adds. “Saunders says ‘A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals,’ and I am looking forward to hearing him share his story at our lecture on April 4th.”

Saunders, a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University and a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 12 books, was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME magazine in 2013.

His lecture, sponsored by the AC Foundation, is free and open to the public. It will be presented at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 4 at West Texas A&M University’s Jack B. Kelley Legacy Hall in Canyon.

AC’s long-running Creative Mind Lecture Series has never before been held outside of Amarillo; however, the 2024 lecture is being presented in cooperation with WTAMU’s Distinguished Lecture Series and the Garry L. Nall Lecture Series, a pillar of the University’s Center for the Study of the American West. Hudson said he has long hoped that the English departments at AC and WTAMU would collaborate on an event such as this. “We are thrilled to be working on this together,” Hudson said.

Saunders was born in Amarillo in 1958, just prior to his family’s relocation to Chicago, and he basically grew up in Illinois. But his parents moved back to Amarillo in 1978, and George, by then an aspiring writer, also returned to the Yellow City in 1982 and enrolled in some literature classes at what then was known as West Texas State University.

“I will never forget the warmth and acceptance I felt at WTSU,” said Saunders. “I remember riding a little motorcycle out to the (Palo Duro) Canyon, just full of ideas and dreams about the writing life, and so happy to be back in an academic setting.”

Saunders held a number of jobs in and around Amarillo back then, including at a slaughterhouse, an apartment complex, and even at a restaurant his father managed, the Chicago Pizzaworks & Speakeasy Lounge. He also played in a country and western band. He says it was while playing one night at a club out on Amarillo Boulevard that he learned of his acceptance into the prestigious graduate writing program at Syracuse.

His subsequent ascent to literary prominence was as swift as it is undisputed. Saunders, who has taught in the creative writing program at Syracuse since 1996, has received a MacArthur Fellowship; the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story; and the Man Booker Prize for his lone novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

His most recent collection of short stories, Liberation Day, has been described as “a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans.”

Saunders’s venerated short stories, coupled with his anticipated spring visit to the Texas Panhandle, prompted Dr. Hudson to create and teach a class at AC this spring semester dubbed “Precarious Realism: George Saunders and the Contemporary Short Story.” When Saunders agreed to present AC’s Creative Mind Lecture, he also agreed to visit with Hudson’s class for an in-person Q&A, which he will do on April 4th, a few hours before driving to Canyon to present his lecture.

“In our class, we generally take one of Saunders’s short stories each week and look at how it works,” Hudson said. “The content has been very well received, and the discussions have been fun and enlightening. I also invited several WT English professors to deliver guest lectures in my class. Their discussions were incredibly insightful and probably resulted in convincing some AC students to continue their degrees down the road. Working with my colleagues there makes sense.

“After all, Saunders writes equal opportunity satire that suggests and sometimes demands that we care a bit for our neighbor, and to consider how we would feel if the character is us in a different life, barely hanging on to the edge of disaster - ‘Precarious Realism,’ right?”

For his lecture, Saunders says he is leaning toward talking about “the idea that the process a writer goes through when writing a story is the same one we are using at every moment of life – starting with a rough outline of a situation and revising and refining that.” he said. “This journey can cause us to be more concerned with specifics than generalities and can also move us away from facile judgements and toward compassion and understanding. And, through reading and writing, we can get better at this process.”

For information about Amarillo College’s 2024 installment of its long-running Creative Mind Lecture Series, please visit info.actx.edu/CM.