author of Stay Gone Days
Keynote: October 27, 7:30 p.m.
Steve Yarbrough returns to the symposium with his latest novel, Stay Gone Days, which recounts the lives of two sisters who, like the author, grew up in a small, Mississippi Delta town and whose lives took them in separate directions to Boston, California, and Poland, all locations that Yarbrough knows well. Yarbrough’s other novels include The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man. He has also authored the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History, and Family Men, along with the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.
Yarbrough is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters—Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris—and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They divide their time between Boston and Krakow. Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.
