“A library could show you everything, if you knew where to look.” ~Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
On Thursday, June 11 at 12:00 PM, South Carolina Humanities will host a Facebook event for “‘I Was Born to Be in a Library’: Pat Conroy’s Great Love of Libraries,” an entertaining and inspiring presentation by Jonathan Haupt, executive director of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center and a scholar on SC Humanities’ Speakers Bureau program. The event will be hosted on the South Carolina Humanities Facebook page.
This thirty-minute “Lunch and Learn” program on best-selling author Pat Conroy’s lifelong love of books and libraries focuses on the roles public libraries, school libraries, and Pat’s own personal library played in his writing life. Through video and audio clips, photographs, and published and unpublished writings by and about Conroy, this discussion welcomes viewers into the book-filled world of one of America’s most beloved writers. Jonathan Haupt will be present in the comments to give additional information and answer questions.
Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center and the founding director of the Pat Conroy Literary Festival. As the former director of the University of South Carolina Press, Haupt created, with the late Pat Conroy, the Story River Books original fiction imprint, named by Garden & Gun magazine as “one of the top ten things to love about the South.” Haupt’s book reviews and author interviews have appeared in the Charleston Post & Courier. the Beaufort Lowcountry Weekly, and the Pat Conroy Literary Center’s blog Porch Talk. He serves on the boards of the South Carolina Academy of Authors and the Friends of South Carolina Libraries. He has moderated panels and presented on topics of small press and university press publishing, literary arts partnerships, and the writing life of Pat Conroy at writers conferences, library conferences, book festivals, libraries, and schools. With novelist Nicole Seitz, Haupt is coeditor of the anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy.
The Speakers Bureau is one of SC Humanities’ longstanding program priorities. Through this program, some of South Carolina’s finest scholars travel throughout the state to share their interests and knowledge of the humanities and to spark discussions about human values, traditions and cultures. In this time of quarantine and social distancing, SC Humanities is pleased to be bringing this particular Speakers Bureau program to a virtual audience. We hope you will join us on June 11!
The mission of SC Humanities is to enrich the cultural and intellectual lives of all South Carolinians. Established in 1973, this 501(c) 3 organization is governed by a volunteer 20-member Board of Directors comprised of community leaders from throughout the state. It presents and/or supports literary initiatives, lectures, exhibits, festivals, publications, oral history projects, videos and other humanities-based experiences that directly or indirectly reach more than 350,000 citizens annually.
