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Author Gann To Speak At 'Kentucky Live Series' Thursday
Bowling Green, Ky. - Kirby Gann, award winning Kentucky author and managing editor of Sarabande Books, will the featured speaker in this month’s “Kentucky Live Series” sponsored by Trace Die Cast at Barnes and Noble Bookstore (1680 Campbell Lane) at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Gann has deep Kentucky roots. His father is a native of Bowling Green and his mother is a native of Mayfield. The family immigrated here in the 19th century. Gann attended public schools in Louisville and graduated from Louisville Male High School. In a recent interview he said that the family made weekly visits to the public library where he checked out novels by S. E. Hinton like “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders” before devouring mysteries and the novels of Stephen King. Reading John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace” persuaded him that he wanted to be a writer. While attending Transylvania University, he was encouraged to write by an English professor while immersing himself in the great literary classics, especially those from Russia and Eastern Europe. He’s been doing it ever since. Kind of a renaissance man, Gann enjoyed a brief career as semi-professional soccer player, somewhat akin to the character Gabriel Toure in his first novel. After stints in Washington, D.C., and Paris and a host of jobs in between, Gann returned to Louisville in 1997 to become managing editor of Sarabande Books and to write. He also plays acoustic guitar in a local band with several recordings. Sarabande Books of Louisville is a nonprofit literary press founded in 1994 which publishes quality poetry, essays and short fiction. They administer two literary contests: the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Gann’s first book, “A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play,” was an edited collection of 36 writings by well-known writers like e. e. cummings and Edmund White. It was published by Sarabande in 2001. His first novel, “The Barbarian Parade: Or, Pursuit of the Un-American Dream,” followed from Hill Street Press in 2004. A reviewer wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Gann plays out the gritty coming-of-age of Gabriel Toure, a Kentucky boy whose close-knit family is shattered and who hurls himself into sex, soccer and the outer limits of free will.” Another reviewer said it’s “far more distressing than ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ but just as well written.” Other reviews have called it compelling and memorable. In July 2005 KET’s bookclub@ket featured “The Barbarian Parade” which they called “mesmerizing” in a series of television programs on KET. An interviewer commented: “Gann creates a portrait of what it means to grow up male in contemporary America.” Gann’s newest novel, “Our Napoleon in Rags,” was published in 2005 by Ig Publishing of Brooklyn, N.Y. A much darker novel than his first, it describes the life of a remarkable group of characters who frequent the Don Quixote Bar in Old Towne, a once fashionable but now seedy section of Montreux, Ky. Here a bipolar disabled but brilliant son of former local politician spends his days trying to develop a neighborhood conscience by distributing broadsides to uninterested neighbors while engaging in quiet acts of subversion. He befriends an inhalant sniffing teenage hustler and seeks to set him on a path of self-redemption. Other memorable characters include a part-Cuban anarchist, his sometime lover a former ballerina turned Internet porn artist, and a Black male primitive artist. Gann is married and lives in the Highlands section of Louisville. When not editing or writing or playing in his band he teaches in the MFA writing program at Spalding University.
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