An Evening with Ben Fountain, author

Doug Fabrizio will sit down with Ben Fountain for an unscripted conversation about his life, literature, and politics.

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. He also created the radio piece “Haiti is Destiny” for This American Life. Fountain’s series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by its editors for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. These essays evolved into his collection Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution.