Provost's Lecture Series

A partnership of the Office of the Provost and the OSU Foundation to bring renowned thinkers, writers, scientists, artists and leaders to OSU to engage, challenge and inspire.

Featuring Mary Karr: Award-Winning, New York Times Bestselling Memoirist & Poet

Lit: Alcoholism, Recovery and the Art of Memoir

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The Provost's Lecture featuring Mary Karr was held on April 13, 2022 via Zoom. The recording will be available until June 13, 2022.

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and New York Times best-selling memoirist, and the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed, best-selling memoirs The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. Her latest books are The Art of Memoir, a master class on the fastest-growing literary genre which debuted at #3 on the New York Times Bestseller List and was blanketed in stellar reviews, and a book for graduates based on her acclaimed 2015 Syracuse commencement speech, Now Go Out There (and Get Curious). In 2015 Syracuse University awarded Karr an honorary doctorate in humane letters. Karr added songwriter to her pedigree with the release of Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell.

The Liars' Club won prizes for best first nonfiction from PEN (The Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction), the Texas Institute for Letters, and was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards. It chronicled her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough sass and literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir, cresting the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. Cherry, her ecstatically reviewed account of a psychedelic adolescence and a moving sexual coming-of-age, followed it into best-sellerdom. Hailed as "the memoir of the season," Lit answers the question asked by thousands of fans: How did Karr make it out of that toxic upbringing to tell her own tale?