The next edition of the Tom M. Cordell Distinguished Lecture Series will be held on April 4 at 7:30 p.m. in the Cordell Conference Room of the Carlton Center on the Abraham Baldwin College campus.
The featured speaker will be author Gwyn Hyman Rubio whose debut novel, Icy Sparks, was listed as a "notable book of the year" in 1998 by The New York Times. When Oprah Winfrey selected the novel for her book club in May 2001, it became a bestseller.
Icy Sparks is a coming-of-age story about a young girl, Icy Sparks, who struggles with Tourette's syndrome, an affliction that results in violent tics and uncontrollable cursing. Her illness, coupled with her lack of family, make Sparks an outcast in her 1950s rural Kentucky community. The story, which is narrated by Sparks as an adult, recounts her childhood as a 10-year-old orphan in Appalachia. The New York Times Book Review hailed Rubio as "a writer of uncommonly warm and tender vision, often comic, brimming with love and hope."
Born in Macon, Rubio grew up in Cordele. She graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor's degree in English. She also received a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing from Warren Wilson College. She and her husband, Angel Rubio, live in Berea, Ky. Rubio's father, Mac Hyman, wrote No Time for Sergeants, a 1954 bestseller that was made into a play and a movie starring Andy Griffith.
The lecture is part of the project "Icy Sparks: Dealing with Differentness," supported by the Georgia Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities and through appropriations from the Georgia General Assembly. Cordell was the director of ABAC's continuing education program for 39 years. He retired in 1979 and passed away in 1991.
Free tickets to the lecture can be picked up beginning March 22 in the Public Relations Office on the second floor of Tift Hall. Because of limited seating, everyone attending the lecture must have a ticket.
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