College Opens Nationwide Tour for Sophie Kerr Prize Winner

Christine Lincoln's Book to Debut from Pantheon September 18

Chestertown, MD, August 27, 2001 — Baltimore-born Christine Lincoln, a 2000 graduate of Washington College and winner of the College's Sophie Kerr Prize, will begin a nationwide tour for her newly published book Sap Rising (Pantheon Books, 2001) on Tuesday, September 18, 2001. She will read from her new work at 4 p.m. in the College's Hynson Lounge. The reading will be followed by a book signing and reception. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

A non-traditional student who graduated at the top of her class, Lincoln is distinguished not only for winning the $54,000 Sophie Kerr Prize, the largest undergraduate literary prize in the nation, but also for receiving within six months of graduation a $135,000 advance from Pantheon (a division of Random House) for her collection of short stories—a singular amount for a yet unpublished writer. Lincoln's inspiring story of hardship, perseverance and personal, academic and creative accomplishment appeared everywhere from the pages of the New York Times to the nationally televised Oprah Winfrey show. Lincoln's storytelling talent, which developed while listening to her grandmother's tales at her Lutherville home, helped her to redeem the vicissitudes of sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and single motherhood through a unique and powerful literary voice.

Lincoln's literary debut, Sap Rising, takes readers inside the hearts and minds of African-Americans whose lives unfold against a vivid rural landscape. The characters that inhabit this work are brought to life with a remarkably light touch and an extraordinary depth of insight and emotion. Kirkus Reviews states that Lincoln's fiction "delicately and graciously delineates the hardscrabble lives of a series of southern rural characters... The slenderness of the narratives belies their emotional strength, revealing the author's deep conviction that the writing process itself can redeem the poverty, ignorance, cruelty in her characters' lives."

The book tour will take Lincoln from Boston to Seattle, but she wanted to start the reading tour "at home."

Reading Tour Schedule

Tuesday, September 18–Chestertown, MD
4:00 p.m., Washington College, Hynson Lounge
300 Washington Ave., Chestertown, MD 21620
Reading and book signing.

Tuesday, October 30–San Francisco, CA
7:30 p.m., Black Oak Books
1491 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94709.
Reading and book signing.

Tuesday, October 2–Baltimore, MD.
12:00 p.m., Tom Pope Show, Powernomics Radio Network
LIVE interview with call-ins.

Wednesday, October 3–Washington, DC
Time TBA, Oprah/Books That Make A Difference Event, Sotheby's.

Thursday, October 4–Boston, MA
7:00 p.m., Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard Street, Brookline MA 02146.
Reading and book signing.

Tuesday, October 9–Detroit, MI
Time TBA
Shrine of the Black Madonna
13535 Livernois, Detroit MI 48238. Reading and book signing.

Wednesday, October 10–Iowa City, IA
8:00 p.m.. Prairie Lights
15 South Dubuque Street, Iowa City IA 52240.
Reading and book signing.

Thursday, October 11—Madison, WI
6:00 p.m., University Bookstore
711 State Street, Madison, WI 53703.
Reading and book signing.

Saturday, October 13–Nashville, TN
12:30 p.m., Southern Festival of Books
War Memorial Plaza, Downtown Nashville, TN.

Monday, October 15–Cleveland, OH
7:00 p.m., Joseph Beth Booksellers
13217 Shaker Square, Cleveland OH 44120. Reading and book signing.

Tuesday, October 16–St. Louis, MO
7:00 p.m., New Voices, New Worlds, Reading Series
Sponsored by the Urban League of St. Louis
Vaughn Cultural Center, 3701 Grandel Square, St. Louis, MO.
Reading and book signing.

Thursday, October 18–Cincinnati, OH
7:00 p.m., Joseph-Beth Booksellers
2692 Madison Road, Cincinnati OH 45208.
Reading and book signing.

Tuesday, October 23–Atlanta, GA
7:00 p.m., Chapter 11, Ansley Mall Store
1544 Piedmont Avenue, Atlanta GA 30324.
Reading and book signing arranged.

Monday, October 29–Seattle, WA
12:00 p.m., University Bookstore
4326 University Way NE, Seattle WA 98105.
Reading and book signing arranged.
7:30 p.m., Elliott Bay Book Company
101 South Main, Seattle, WA 98104.
Reading and book signing.

Thursday, November 1–New York, NY
7:00 p.m., Barnes and Noble
290 Baychester Avenue, Bronx, NY 10475.
Reading and book signing arranged.

Wednesday, November 7 & Friday, November 9–Baltimore, MD
TIME TBA
Community College of Baltimore County, Second Annual Writers Conference.
Reading, Q&A, and book signing.
Open to the public.

Saturday, November 10–Westminster, MD
11:30 a.m., Fifth Annual Random House Book Fair
Carroll Community College.
Open to the public.

For booking information, contact:

Sophie Cottrell, East Coast publicist, 212-572-2685, scottrell@randomhouse.com,
or
Robin Benway, West Coast publicist, 310-582-8810, rbenway@randomhouse.com

Official Release from Pantheon:

Sap Rising
By Christine Lincoln

"The 12 stories in Lincoln’s first book, which center on the lives of African Americans in the rural South, are so painfully beautiful that they must be read in spurts. . . . The knowledge with which Lincoln writes is too much for any one person to harbor." --Library Journal (starred review)

"[Lincoln] delicately and graciously delineates the hardscrabble lives of a series of southern rural characters. . . . The slenderness of the narratives belies their emotional strength, revealing the author’s deep conviction that the writing process itself can redeem the poverty, ignorance, cruelty in her characters’ lives." --Kirkus Reviews

Christine Lincoln’s literary debut, SAP RISING (Pantheon Books/September 18, 2001/$20.00) takes us inside the hearts and minds of African-Americans whose lives unfold against a vividly evoked Southern rural landscape. The characters that inhabit this work are brought to life with a remarkably light touch and an extraordinary depth of insight and emotion: a woman who must choose between a hopeless farmer who reminds her of her father and the call of the train whistle beckoning her to imaginary vistas…an abandoned seven year-old girl living inside a fantasy of invisibility…a boy whose world is both expanded and contracted by stories he hears from a beautiful stranger.

By any account, Lincoln’s has been a nightmarish life redeemed only by her storytelling talent developed as a child at her grandmother’s knee. Sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and single motherhood have all impacted her life, and ultimately influenced her writing. At the age of 34, Lincoln graduated from Washington College in Maryland with a perfect grade point average, winning the school’s Sophie Kerr Prize and $54,000 (the richest undergraduate literary purse in the nation, awarded to the member of the graduating class showing the greatest literary promise). Lincoln’s is a magnificent story of overcoming the vicissitudes of life through dogged perseverance. Nobody is more surprised by this wonderful shift of fortune than Lincoln herself, who says, "The truth is, I should be dead. I am living proof that it is never too late to save yourself."

SAP RISING signals the arrival of a stunning new voice in contemporary American fiction–a voice whose power and intensity are matched only by the haunting effects of its simplicity. Her lyrical fiction about the African-American experience prove that Lincoln’s work transcends its own rich particularity to speak with stunning clarity to the most fundamental elements of the human experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christine Lincoln was born and raised in Baltimore. At age thirty-four she graduated from Washington College and was awarded the school’s Sophie Kerr Prize, an event that was covered by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Sophie Kerr Winner Receives $135,000 Advance for First Book

Chestertown, MD, February 12, 2001 — Christine Lincoln '00, winner of the 2000 Sophie Kerr Prize, the largest undergraduate literary prize in the nation, has received a $135,000 advance from Pantheon, a division of Random House Publishers, for her first collection of short stories.

"I think they're superb," said literary agent Sara Chalfant of the Wylie Agency in New York concerning Lincoln's stories. "They're in the glorious tradition of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and the early Alice walker. They are luminous."

Several publishing houses bid on Lincoln's collection, but she chose Pantheon because of editor Erroll McDonald.

"I felt like his vision of the book was closest to my vision," Lincoln said. "He said, 'You're an African American woman, this is your voice.'"

The collection will include stories that Lincoln submitted last year to the Sophie Kerr Committee as well as others written after graduation. The book is slated for a fall 2001 release.

Washington College Awards Nation's Largest Undergraduate Prize

Chestertown, MD — Most college seniors will look back on their graduation ceremony as a day of pomp and circumstance culminating in a handshake and a diploma. For Christine Lincoln, a 34-year old single mother and English major at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, the ceremony brought other rewards: top honors, a dream fulfilled and a check for $54,266. Lincoln's creative writing portfolio, which she describes as an exploration of "what it means to be African-American," earned her the largest undergraduate literary award in the country — the Sophie Kerr Prize.

The awarding of the Sophie Kerr Prize, given annually to the graduating senior who demonstrates the greatest "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor," has in recent decades been a highlight of the commencement ceremony at the 218-year-old liberal arts college. The Prize, worth $54,266 this year, is among the largest literary awards in the world. Washington College has awarded more than three quarters of a million in prize money since it was first given in 1968, most often to writers of poetry and fiction. Scholarly and journalistic works, though less often selected, are given equal consideration.

Lincoln's winning submission was a collection of mostly short fiction entitled "Sap Rising."

"Christine is a superior storyteller as well as a perceptive critical writer" said Professor Richard Gillin, chair of the English Department and of the Sophie Kerr committee which selected Lincoln's text from a pool of 23 submissions. "She integrates scene and mood, uses haunting rhythms, dramatic tensions, and gathers these elements and fuses them to make the ordinary world come alive with insight."

Robert Mooney, Director of the O'Neill Literary House who served as Lincoln's thesis advisor described Lincoln as "a true storyteller, a natural, one mindful of the past that has made the present who carries it forward to keep it alive and, in the process, enriches the lives around her." He adds "The profound courage that undergirds Christine's characters mirrors her own."

An admirer of such diverse writers as William Faulkner, Somerset Maugham and Toni Morrison, Lincoln says it was her grandmother who taught her "the magic of words" and inspired her to become a storyteller. Lincoln remembers hearing story after story on the porch of an old farmhouse in Lutherville, Maryland, the community where Lincoln grew up and which she fictionlizes as "Grandville," in many of her stories. Lincoln says her stories enact the tension between personal desire and the struggle to belong to a community, a conflict she finds at the heart of the African American experience where the African conciousness of "we" meets the American obsession with "I."

Lincoln's exploration of cultural issues took her twice to South Africa during her undergraduate years. She received grants from the Washington College Society of Junior Fellows to spend time in that country studying problems of domestic violence. Closer to home she worked with other student leaders to found the Center for the Study of Black Culture on the Washington College campus. All this while raising Takii, her six-year-old son in an apartment near campus.

Lincoln was working as a radiology technician in Baltimore when her son was born seriously ill. "I gave up everything — my house, my car — to pay his medical bills for the two years." Faced with the prospect of starting over she decided to pursue her dream of the writing life. A newspaper article about the Sophie Kerr prize drew her to Washington College, the only school to which she applied as a transfer student from Baltimore City Community College. "I read about their community of writers and knew that was the place for me," Lincoln said.

Lincoln plans to pursue a Ph.d. in African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Sophie Kerr Prize is the namesake of an Eastern Shore woman who made her fortune in New York, writing light women's fiction during the 1930s and 1940s. In accordance with the terms of her will, one-half of the annual income from her bequest to the College is awarded each year to the graduating senior demonstrating the best potential for literary achievement. The other half funds scholarships, supports student publications and the purchase of books, and brings an array of visiting writers, editors and publishers to campus to read, visit classes, and discuss student work. Her gift has provided the nucleus for an abundance of literary activity on the bucolic Eastern Shore campus.

Washington College is a small liberal arts college on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Founded in 1782, it is Maryland's oldest chartered college, and the tenth oldest in the nation.