10/2/95

Janet McCoy (mccoyjl@mail.auburn.edu)

NOTED ALABAMA WRITER ALBERT MURRAY TO VISIT AU OCT. 12

AUBURN -- Jazz historian, novelist and noted essayist Albert Murray of New York will speak on the Auburn University campus on Thursday, Oct. 12.

Considered by many Alabama's leading African-American author, Murray will speak and read from his work at 4 p.m. in the AU Hotel and Conference Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow in the conference center.

Murray's visit is sponsored by AU's offices of Outreach, Minority Advancement, Special Programs, AU's Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Alabama Writers' Forum.

An Alabama native who studied at Tuskegee University, and a contemporary of Ralph Ellison's, Murray has several reprints, a new work of fiction, Seven League Boots, and a book of essays, The Blue Devils of Nada, due out in 1995.

In addition, Modern Library, a division of Random House, this year reprinted Murray's South to a Very Old Place, in its "The World's Best Books" series for 1995.

Originally printed in 1971, Time magazine said of Murray's classic memoir, South To a Very Old Place: "A classic African-American memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s . . . Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, (and) the gospel singer's depth of feeling."

Murray's other published works include: The Omni-Americans, Stompin' the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, Hero and the Blues and Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray.

Duke Ellington was once quoted as saying that "Albert Murray is a man whose learning did not interfere with understanding."

Walker Percy said Murray's essay collection, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970, "well may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture, published in this generation."

On Tuesday, Oct. 10, he will also appear at the Selma Public Library with scholar Larry Allums of the University of Mobile as one of 10 featured writers in "Alabama Voices", a statewide public program funded by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and sponsored by the AU Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Alabama Writers' Forum.

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CONTACT: Jeanie Thompson, executive director at the Alabama Writers' Forum, 334/844-4947.

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(NOTE TO MEDIA: Time has been made available in Murray's schedule Thursday, Oct. 12, before his lecture at AU. Contact Janet McCoy at 334/844-9999 if you are interested in a one-on-one interview with Murray.)