Well, I would have been honored to--
[LAUGHTER]
--but I'm actually introducing Bos.
[CHUCKLES] Yeah, I too am so grateful that we
have these dear friends and alumni of the program here.
Robert Boswell is the author of nine books of fiction,
including this short story collection, The Heyday
of The Insensitive Bastards, and such novels as Century's Son,
Mystery Ride, and Crooked Hearts, which
was made into the movie of the same title.
It's a wonderful movie.
And when I asked my husband to check the Internet Movie
Database for the year that Crooked Hearts came out,
he read in the brief bio that Robert Boswell was up 32%
in popularity this week.
[LAUGHTER]
And to find out why, I would have had
to subscribe to the IMDbPro.
So I can just imagine why he was up in popularity.
[LAUGHTER]
Robert Boswell has published two books of nonfiction,
including The Half-Known World, his book on the craft
of writing fiction.
He's also had a prize-winning play produced.
His fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The New
Yorker, Esquire, Pushcart Prize Stories, O. Henry Prize
Stories, and a host of other literary magazines.
He teaches creative writing at the University
of Houston, New Mexico State University, and the Warren
Wilson MFA program.
He's a gifted and generous teacher.
And people who haven't had the good fortune
to be a student in the classroom ought
to be aware that he's distilled many years of experience
as a reader, writer, and teacher into his argument
for literary fiction that he so carefully develops
in The Half-Known World, a great book
to read in tandem with the most recent story
collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards.
The title of the collection suggests,
to anyone who knows Robert Boswell, that this
was a book that had to be laboriously researched,
since he is a man of modesty, intelligence, and sensitivity,
and these are things that he shared with all of us
for many years in his work and in his life.
Robert Boswell.
[APPLAUSE]