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Keynote Panel

Saturday, March 13, at 2 p.m. a keynote panel discussion will be held at the University of Oklahoma Law School. Moderator, David Draper Clark, and crime novel enthusiasts Jim Davis, Bill Hagen, and David Kipen will take a closer look at the crime classic The Maltese Falcon and discuss its characters, themes, symbolism, and why it is more than just a whodunit.

The Keynote Panel Discussion, The Maltese Falcon: The Plot Thickens, is free and open to the public. Free visitor parking for this event is located on the south side of the Law School. To get to this parking lot take Asp Ave. south past Timberdell Road. Turn at the first right, and it is the second building on the right. Click here to download directions.

David Draper Clark is the former editor in chief of World Literature Today magazine, where for nearly three decades he helped administer the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Puterbaugh Conferences on World Literature. A founding member of the Friends of the Oklahoma Center for the Book, he served two terms as the organization’s president. Clark is a regular contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year and has been involved in programming and publishing with the American Literary Translators Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN International, UNESCO and the International Parliament of Writers in Paris, as well as Spain’s Prince of Asturias Foundation. Currently he is at work on two book-length translations from the Spanish.

Jim Davis was elected president of the International Association of Crime Writers in 2008. He has served as the senior professor in the Professional Writing Program of the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications since 1991, teaching fiction, non-fiction, and screen writing. After publishing numerous short stories and articles in periodicals from Early American Life to Shakespeare Quarterly to Seattle Review, Davis published his first novel, The Murder of Frau Schutz, in 1988. It was voted one of the five Best First mysteries by the Mystery Writers of America and received an Edgar Allan Poe Scroll award. This title was followed by White Rook, Bloody Marko, Red Knight, And The Angels Sing, and The Vertigo Murder.

William Hagen has published a number of articles on Joseph Conrad, Malcolm Lowry, and film adaptations of fiction. He is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today. Active as a lecturer in the Oklahoma Humanities Council-sponsored "Let's Talk About It" series in libraries throughout the state, he designed the "Oklahoma Experience; Re-Visions" program. He has served as a moderator and chair of the Scholars' Panel for the 2003, 2005, and 2007 Red Dirt Book Festivals held in Shawnee.

Former San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen was director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts from 2005 to 2009, and is the author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs (both from Melville House), and editor of A Raft of Books: How American Literature Saved Our Lives (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2010). He has also worked as a regular book critic and essayist for National Public Radio’s “Day to Day” program, and presented Santa Monica NPR station KCRW-FM’s weekly commentary and podcast “Overbooked.” In addition to his work in print and broadcast, Kipen has served on prize juries for the National Book Critics Circle (where he served as a board member), the Commonwealth Club of California, and PEN.

Funding for scholar participation in the Keynote Panel Discussion and in other The Big Read: The Maltese Falcon events is provided in part by the Oklahoma Humanities Council.