A memorial service for the late Louis D. Rubin, a professor emeritus of English, will be held Feb. 9 at 2 p.m. in the auditorium of the Genome Sciences Building at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rubin, a novelist, essayist, editor, founder of the Southern Literary Journal and co-founder of Algonquin Books, passed away on Nov. 16 in Pittsboro at age 89.
Rubin and Shannon Ravenel co-founded Algonquin Books in 1983 to discover and promote talented new voices of Southern literature — voices like Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons and Clyde Edgerton, among many others. The New York Times called him “a champion of Southern writers.”
“He had his hand in any number of things, and he did them all exceptionally well,” said UNC English professor Fred Hobson. “As one might say — focusing both on his many accomplishments and his primary area of scholarly inquiry — he was a Southern Renaissance man.”
Parking is available in the nearby Bell Tower Parking Deck. The service is sponsored by the department of English and comparative literature.
English department chair Beverly Taylor will open and close the service. Speakers include Clyde Edgerton, Joseph Flora, William Harmon, Meg Harper, Jill McCorkle, Shannon Ravenel and Robert Rubin.
UNC’s Friends of the Library will host a reception in Wilson Library immediately following the service.
For UNC tributes to Rubin, visit http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/content/professor-louis-rubin.
