Audio Click on icon to hear interview with David Anthony Durham Notes to editors  • References to Abilene, Salina  • Editor's note: Scanned photo of Durham and copies of New York Times and Kansas City Star book reviews are available on request from University Relations. Search KU News releases Subscribe now to receive KU News by email

Contact: Giselle Anatol, KU English department, (785) 864-2530.

Novelist of black teen's coming-of-age tale set on Kansas frontier to talk at KU

LAWRENCE -- A new novelist, whose first book focuses on a coming-of-age story of a black teenager on the Kansas frontier, will meet with area English teachers and University of Kansas students at KU on Oct. 8 and 9.

David Anthony Durham's first novel, "Gabriel's Story," published this spring by Doubleday, has been widely reviewed and well received. His next book, "Walk Through Darkness," will be published in June 2002 and he has signed with Doubleday to write two more books.

Durham will be the featured author for the 49th annual conference on "Composition and Literature: Teaching Traditions in a Time of Transitions" on Monday, Oct. 8, in the Kansas Union. About 100 English teachers from area high schools and colleges and universities are expected to attend.

Durham will address the teachers and invited guests during the 12:20 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, luncheon in the Kansas Union ballroom. On Tuesday, Oct. 9, Durham who teaches fiction writing at Colorado College , will also meet with KU students in an advanced creating writing class at 1 p.m. KU English department faculty has also arranged for Durham to meet with selected creative writing students to review their work one-on-one.

In addition, Durham will read his fiction from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, during a book signing at Border's Bookstore, 700 New Hampshire.

Set in central Kansas in 1870 in the fictional town of Crownsville, Durham's story focuses on Gabriel Lynch, a 15-year-old African-American who has moved from Baltimore with his mother to his stepfather's farm. Dissatisfied with the drudgery of homesteading and growing increasingly disconnected from his family, Gabriel forsakes the farm for a life of higher adventure. His journey begun in hope is laced with danger and propelled by a cast of brutal characters.

The Kansas City Star book review ventures that Durham's fictional Crownsville is probably a hybrid of Abilene and Salina. "It's less the story of an African-American boy in search of himself than a story of a boy who happens to be black in search of himself," the reviewer wrote of "Gabriel's Story."

In a phone interview, Durham said, "When I discovered that African-Americans had shared in the Westward expansion I became very interested in making them the focus of a novel. 'Gabriel's Story' isn't about 'The Black West' or anything like that. I'm not an historian. But I loved the notion of taking a young black male and placing him within those difficult times.

"Kansas became the starting and concluding point because of the possibility of freedom provided by the expanses of land, but also because of the incredible challenges of working that land - tedious and constant labor, sod houses, plagues of insects, wild fires, etc. Clearly, it was challenging time, a moment that defines a lot within the American psyche, and I wanted to include African-Americans in that."

"Gabriel's Story" has been favorably reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Review, Booklist The New Yorker and the Kansas City Star, among others. The New York Times review calls the book's language "sonorous yet disciplined" and "both artistically impressive and emotionally satisfying."

His second book, also a historical novel, "Walk Through Darkness," is set in1850's in the Mid-Atlantic region is about a runaway slave and the tracker - a Scottish immigrant - who is pursuing him.

Describing himself as a full-time writer and husband/father, Durham notes that he has two more books in progress, one to be about Hannibal of Carthage and the Second Punic War against Rome. "A change of pace indeed, but a time and subject that has interested me greatly," he notes.

In 1992, Durham won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright FictionAwardß, offered by the Hurston/Wright Foundation of Hyattsville, Md. Born in New York City, Durham spent his childhood in Trinidad, his parent's homeland, and in Maryland. He received a B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. Durham, along with his wife, daughter and son, divides his time between Scotland and the United States.