The annual Hemingway Distinguished Lecture is presented each July, honoring the month of Ernest Hemingway’s birth and death. The event celebrates the power of words and the creative spirit in a landscape that Hemingway loved.

This year, The Community Library welcomes PERCIVAL EVERETT, a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His latest novel, JAMES, was published in March of 2024 to critical acclaim. His other titles include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.

The lecture will be presented outdoors on the Library's Donaldson Robb Family Lawn. Chairs will be set up for this event, so attendees do not need to bring their own. A book signing will follow.

This program will be livestreamed, and the recording will be available for two weeks upon request. Seating is limited, so registration is required to join us in person, and registration is required to receive the Vimeo link to watch online.

Registration to attend in-person opens on Monday, April 21.