Nicholls to Host 2023 Fletcher Lecture Series Featuring Award-Winning Novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin

THIBODAUX, La. – Award-winning novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin will be the guest lecturer for the 2023 Fletcher Lecture Series set to take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 12, in Nicholls State University’s Gouaux Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. The 2023 recipients of the Linda Stanga Award for Excellence in Literary Studies and the 2023 Noel Toups Award will also be recognized at the event. Books will be available for purchase, and there will be a book signing as well as a brief question-and-answer after the event.

A New Orleans native and former corporate lawyer and restaurateur, Ruffin is a professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award, the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review and “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.”

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s most recent book is the story collection, “The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You,” is a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, “We Cast a Shadow” was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize and was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin’s work primarily focuses on the lived experiences and history of the African-American community in New Orleans.

For 38 years, The Fletcher Lecture Series has brought major writers and literary figures to campus to speak and interact with students. Past lecturers have included such luminaries as Robert Penn Warren, Noel Polk, Lee Smith, Gerald Early, Marianne Robinson, Yuri Herrera and the filmmaker Behn Zeitlin.

This program is funded under a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of either the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.