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Dr. John McNally, writer-in-residence at ŷ������Ƭ, will discuss how failure is essential to the creative process at the upcoming Gloria Fiero Lecture.

McNally’s talk, “The Art of Failure,” will be held at 11 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 24, in Ducrest Guilfry Auditorium at Angelle Hall. The free lecture is open to the public.

The lecture series, established 20 years ago, is held annually. It is named for Dr. Gloria Fiero, who was a professor of history at UL Lafayette.

McNally, a native of Chicago, is an acclaimed author or editor of 14 books. They include three novels, “After the Workshop,” “The Book of Ralph,” and “America's Report Card.” He also has written two story collections. McNally’s “Troublemakers” won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and the Nebraska Book Award. His“Ghosts of Chicago,” was a Chicagoland Indie Bestseller and voted one of the top 20 fiction books of 2008 by readers of “The Believer,” a literary and arts magazine.

His two nonfiction books are “The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist” and “Vivid and Continuous: Essays on the Craft of Fiction.”

McNally holds an undergraduate degree from Southern Illinois ŷ������Ƭ. He earned a masters of fine arts in English at the ŷ������Ƭ of Iowa, where he attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and studied under Frank Conroy and T.C. Boyle. McNally earned a doctorate in creative writing at the ŷ������Ƭ of Nebraska. 

He has served as a professor of creative writing and a writer-in-residence at several universities.

The Gloria Fiero Lecture Series is sponsored by the Friends of the Humanities. The non-profit organization was established in 1989. It is dedicated to enhancing the role of the interdisciplinary humanities at UL Lafayette and in Acadiana; supporting the College of Liberal Arts; and strengthening the resources of the ŷ������Ƭ’s humanities program.

For more information, contact Kathy Rosenberg at (337) 482-1421 or kathy.rosenberg@louisiana.edu