Alexandra Styron to Speak at Stony Brook Southampton February 26

Alexandra Styron, the daughter of Sophie’s Choice writer William Styron, is the next guest at Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series, coming February 26 to discuss her memoir centered on her father’s life, art and depression, and to share her advice with aspiring writers.

Presented by the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature Program, Writers Speak Wednesdays brings acclaimed wordsmiths of all stripes—novelists, essayists, journalists—to the campus in Shinnecock Hills to discuss their craft.

Styron earned her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and she teaches memoir writing in the Hunter College MFA program. Originally from Litchfield, Connecticut, she now lives in Brooklyn. She wrote the novel All the Finest Girls and, more recently, her memoir, Reading My Father.

Reading My Father is about an American artist and his life, as well as the challenges of being raised by someone who is passionately devoted to his art before all else, according to Styron.

Her novel is about a woman who goes to the Caribbean for the funeral of her former nanny, who had saved her from an unhappy childhood. Years after losing track of the person who helped raise her, the woman meets the family her nanny had left behind.

The event is free and open to the public, beginning at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of of Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton, 239 Montauk Highway.

Upcoming guests are Susan Wheeler, March 5; Megan Abbott, March 12; Masha Gessen interviewed by former New Yorker fiction editor Dan Menaker, April 2; Mark Epstein, M.D., April 9; and Dinah Lenney, April 30.

For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit stonybrook.edu/mfa.