Lecture: H.G. Bissinger, Author of Friday Night Lights
Pulitzer Prize-winning author H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger will speak on “The Art of Non-Fiction Storytelling.” The event, sponsored by the journalism program, will begin at 6:15 p.m. with a book signing reception.
In 1987, Bissinger was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in the Philadelphia Inquirer on corruption in the Philadelphia court system. His best known work, Friday Night Lights, an account of the 1988 football season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, sold nearly 2 million copies. In 2004, this true-life story became a motion picture and later a television series on NBC in 2006. In 1998, he wrote A Prayer for the City, and a New York Times’ bestseller, Three Nights in August, in 2005. Bissinger has also been a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
The journalism program at UMass Amherst has provided 30 copies of Friday Night Lights for an English class at Commerce High School in Springfield, Mass. Thirty Commerce students from alumni Brian Duffey’s English class will be bused to UMass Amherst for the Bissinger talk. Also, faculty member Nick McBride teaches a community journalism class where UMass and Commerce students work together once a week.
The event is part of the third annual Journalism Program Lecture Series on Broadcast and the Media. The series, which is funded by David and Teena Kantor, has brought prominent journalists and editors to UMass Amherst to speak about special topics in journalism. David Kantor is a 1979 alumnus of UMass Amherst.