WMRA and James Madison University present The John Grisham Writers Hour with special guest Alice McDermott, an award winning novelist who also worked at Lynchburg College in Virginia as a writer-in residence. Grisham, who has 40 novels under his belt, sat down with McDermott in March 2019 on the campus of James Madison University.
Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2017. Her seventh novel, Someone, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal and elsewhere. She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Carington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
The John Grisham Writers Hour is hosted by James Madison University's College of Arts & Letters and is a production of WMRA.