Novelist, alumna Dewberry to speak at annual Friends of the Library dinner

Novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry, a Vanderbilt University alumna, will speak Oct. 12 at the 22nd annual memb ership dinner for the Friends of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

Dewberry graduated from Vanderbilt with a bachelor's degree in 1983. While a student at Vanderbilt, she received the ASCAP Song Writing Scholarship.

She is the author of two novels, two plays and numerous articles and reviews - most of which were originally published under the name Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn. She has been called "an absolute original" by famed novelist Pat Conroy.

Dewberry's first novel, "Many Things Have Happened Since He Died," was published by Doubleday in 1990 and reprinted by Vintage Contemporaries in 1992. She co-adapted it for the stage with Tom Key, who directed its premiere at the Horizon Theater in Atlanta in 1944. It garnered individual artist grants for her from the Georgia and Alabama State Arts Councils.

Her second novel, "Break the Heart of Me," published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1994, was a Literary Guild Alternate Selection. She will read from the novel at the Friends of the Library dinner.

Dewberry characterized "Break the Heart of Me" as "a story about a woman whose memories . . . force her to rethink all her relationships with men, past and present. It's a story about having your heart broken, but also a story about putting yourself back together."

Dewberry, who earned a Ph.D. in 20th-century American literature from Emory University in 1989, has taught creative writing and American literature at Emory, the University of the South, Ohio State University, the University of Southern California and Samford University.

She has published several articles on Hemingway and other non-fiction and was a regular reviewer of novels for the Atlanta Constitution in 1990 and 1991.

Dewberry lives in Lake Charles, La., with her husband, Pulitzer-prize winning author Robert Olen Butler ("A Good Scene from a Strange Mountain").