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NOVELIST CONNIE PORTER JOINS
MARK TWAIN WRITING COMPETITION JUDGING PANEL
Buffalo, NY – The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library (B&ECPL) is pleased to announce that novelist Connie Porter, an area native, has been named to the judging panel for its Mark Twain Writing Competition "A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage." She joins a list of prominent names in contemporary literature that includes authors Joyce Carol Oates and Lauren Belfer and humorist Roy Blount.
The B&ECPL launched the writing competition on March 1, 2001, 125 years after Twain proposed the idea to his good friend and editor of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells. Twain had suggested that contemporary writers of the time compose a story based on his outline, entitled "A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage" which would have been published in The Atlantic Monthly. Twain’s is the only finished version, which up until now, has remained unpublished. The Library has taken up where Twain and Howells left off and will publish the winning entries on its Web site, www.buffalolib.org. The Atlantic Monthly will publish Twain’s version in its July 2001 issue and W.W. Norton & Company will produce a hard cover gift edition this fall.
Since debuting the competition on the Internet, the B&ECPL Web site has received more than 4,500 hits from across North America and as far away as England.
Having grown up in a Buffalo housing project with eight siblings, Connie Porter set her first novel, All-Bright Court, in her hometown. In 1991, the American Library Association (ALA) named the novel a Notable Book, and the New York Times distinguished it as one of its "Best Books." She is the author of the Addy series of historical children's novels from American Girl. Porter’s essays have appeared in Glamour and Seventeen and her book reviews in The Boston Globe and New York Times.
Porter returns to Buffalo’s inner city in her latest novel, Imani All Mine (Houghton Mifflin; 1999). The novel has received numerous awards including being named an Honor Book by the Black Caucus of the ALA, winning an Alex Award from the Young Adult Services Association of the ALA and being chosen as one of the Best Books for Young Adults by the ALA.
For further information about the Mark Twain Writing Competition, call (716) 858-7181 or visit www.buffalolib.org.