Marie “Lorrie” Moore ’78
Major: English
Profession: Writer, Professor
Residence: Madison, WI

The novels, essays and short stories of Marie “Lorrie” Moore are filled with contradictions. She blends, as one reviewer wrote, boldness with poignancy, nouns and adjectives that never matched before, colorful detail and meaningful blur.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of St. Lawrence, where she wrote a short story that won first prize in a contest sponsored by Seventeen magazine and thus launched her career, Moore earned her M.F.A. from Cornell University. Her master’s thesis became her first book, Self-Help, and her subsequent work has included two novels, two fiction collections, a children’s book, and short stories, reviews and essays in such periodicals as the New York Times Book Review, Cosmopolitan and Ms. Magazine. She has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In her 2004 Commencement address at St. Lawrence, she said, "Most of what is good and useful and helpful and beautiful in the world comes from an imagination that is being vigorously used. To imagine – which means to step away slightly from what is strictly one's own point of view – is at the heart of tolerance if not understanding, sympathy if not actual explicit generosity.”

Since 1984, Moore has taught at the University of Wisconsin, where she holds the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities.