Daniel Wallace
The Chattanooga State Humanities Department’s Writers@Work program is pleased to welcome best-selling Southern author Daniel Wallace to Chattanooga for a week-long celebration of his novel Big Fish, April 6-10.
The Writers@Work series celebrates Southern literature by integrating the work of selected authors into the curriculum of the Department's Composition Two course. Each year, the nearly 1,500 students enrolled in Composition Two engage in activities focused around a specific work while practicing critical course skills. Every April, the W@W featured author comes to Chattanooga to share his or her work and writing experience with the faculty, staff, and students of Chattanooga State and the general public.
Past W@W authors include an impressive lineup of nationally-recognized and best-selling Southern authors, including Terry Kay, Jill McCorkle, Lila Quintero Weaver, Rick Bragg, George Singleton, Ron Rash, Robert Morgan, Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Chattanooga’s own Ishmael Reed. The 2017 W@W author, Tayari Jones, recently received the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work–Fiction for her novel, An American Marriage, which was also a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection.
This year’s Writers@Work installment features Daniel Wallace and his novel Big Fish, which Publishers Weekly describes as featuring “a plainspoken style dotted with transcendent passages” and possessing “the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale,” stating that “the novel's roomy structure allows the mystery and lyricism of the story to coalesce.”
Mr. Wallace attended Emory University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but left before earning a degree to work in the family business abroad. After deciding that the world of business was not where he belonged, Mr. Wallace eventually returned to Chapel Hill to learn to write, work in a bookstore, and illustrate refrigerator magnets. After publishing a number of short stories in literary journals over the next decade and a half, Mr. Wallace’s novel Big Fish was bought and published by Algonquin Books in 1998. The novel quickly rose to best-seller status, was adapted into a film directed by Tim Burton, and became a Broadway musical. After publishing two more novels, Mr. Wallace finished his degree in English in 2008 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program.
Mr. Wallace’s notable works include Big Fish (1998), Ray in Reverse (2000), The Watermelon King (2003), Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007), The Kings and Queens of Roam (2013), and Extraordinary Adventures (2017). Mr. Wallace was awarded the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction in 2008 and the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer of the Year in 2019. His shorter works appear in The Massachusetts Review, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories. Mr. Wallace is also an accomplished illustrator, and his illustrations and drawings have appeared in the L.A. Times and Italian Vanity Fair.
The Writers@Work program would like to invite the public to the following events free of charge.
Public Schedule of Events
Inside the Mind of Daniel Wallace: The Behind-the-Writer Interview
Tuesday, April 7 at 6 p.m.
Tennessee Aquarium IMAX Theater
201 Chestnut St, Chattanooga, TN 37402
Join us in the Great Hall of the Tennessee Aquarium’s IMAX Theater for an interview with author Daniel Wallace about writing, life in the South, and his novel Big Fish. Stick around afterward for a dessert reception, book sales/signing, and a free IMAX movie.
ChattState Chautauqua: “Fish Out of Water-Translating Fantasy to Film”
Thursday, April 9 at 2 p.m.
Charles W. Branch Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) Room 30 on the main campus
4501 Amnicola Highway; Chattanooga, TN 37406
What does Daniel Wallace have to say about the movie business and how his novel Big Fish ended up on the big screen? Come hear it straight from the fish’s mouth in this in-depth discussion of Big Fish with Wallace with Wallace and Chattanooga State’s Introductory Film Studies class. Book signing to follow.
Find more information at https://www.facebook.com/ChattStateChautauqua/.
Big Fish: The Musical
Book by John August. Music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa.
Presented through special arrangement with Theatrical Rights Worldwide.
Thursday, April 9 at 6 p.m.
Humanities Theatre on the main campus
4501 Amnicola Highway; Chattanooga, TN 37406
Before curtain, join Daniel Wallace and the production’s cast for heavy hors d'oeuvres and light conversation from 6-6:45 p.m.
Then prepare to be transported to Spectre for the musical stage adaptation of Wallace's book beginning at 7:30 p.m.
Admission is free, but a ticket is required for the musical. Tickets available at www.chattbigread.com.
Additional performances on Friday, April 10 and Saturday, April 11 at 7:30 p.m.
For more information on the program or these events, please visit the program’s website at www.chattbigread.com.