Laureates Writers Series Presents P.S. Duffy
Tuesday | February 6 | 7 pm
Blue Heron Coffeehouse | 162 W 2nd St.
The Laureates Writers series will feature distinguished writer P.S. Duffy for its Tuesday, February 6 program at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse.
P.S. (Penny) Duffy was born in 1948, during the Communist Revolution, to American parents in what is now Wuhan, China. She grew up in Massachusetts and Maryland, and worked 17 years in Washington, D.C. before getting her doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota. She has lived in Rochester with her husband, Joe, for 34 years.
Described by teachers as a “day-dreamer” who spent too much time in her imagination, Penny wrote stories and poems about dying soldiers, clever bears, sad hobos, lovelorn pirates, and at age ten, a novel she called “Two Greek Boys.” For some reason, she says, it went unpublished. Despite this childhood setback, she eventually published poems, a memoir, and a novel, but not until she had retired from a 27-year career in neurologic communication disorders, during which she wrote a graduate textbook based on her research, titled Right Hemisphere Damage: Disorders of Communication and Cognition. Her memoir of her family’s years in China, A Stockbridge Homecoming (Bright Sky Press) came out in 2001.
Critics agree that her novel The Cartographer of No Man’s Land (W.W. Norton, New York, 2013), later published in Canada, Great Britain, Taiwan, and Israel, was outstanding. Set in the trenches of France and a fishing village in Nova Scotia during the First World War, it was a Barnes and Noble Discover selection and a Booksellers of America pick, a New York Post and Oprah Book of the Week, a national LibraryReads selection, and a finalist for the international Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which recognizes the power of fiction to foster peace.
“Turning the final page, I wanted to go back to the beginning if only to contemplate a writer who has such a broad and compassionate understanding of the human condition,” said the reviewer in The Washington Post. “A deep and vivid exploration of the human heart and the high seas,” reminiscent of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, wrote the reviewer for The Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Committee called it “a haunting meditation on family, friendship, and sacrifice, bridging the distance between past and present, duty and honor, obligation and love.”
The Laureates Writers series is co-sponsored by Shipwreckt Books, Chapter Two Books, the Winona Public Library, and the Blue Heron Coffeehouse. P.S. Duffy’s presentation begins at 7 pm and will be followed by an open mic session open to the public.
Shipwreckt Books and Laureate Writers Series organizers Ken McCullough and Emilio DeGrazia are members of the River Arts Alliance. To learn more about the benefits of membership, please visit: riverartsalliance.org/membership/.