Elizabeth Gilbert will be speaking at the Charles W. Eisemann Center on Tuesday, February 24 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are still available for $37/each. The Eisemann Center is located at 2351 Performance Drive, Richardson, Texas 75082. Purchase Tickets online or by calling 972.744.4650.

[From DMA Arts & Letters Live]

Eat, Pray, Love catapulted Elizabeth Gilbert into literary stardom and has become a best-selling phenomenon, with over five million copies in print. The memoir follows Gilbert—who leaves behind a divorce, affair, and depression—on a yearlong quest to bridge the gulf between body, mind, and spirit. In a carefully constructed narrative, she explores “the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.” Her writing—imbued with candor, wisdom, vitality, and wry, self-deprecating humor—has won her millions of loyal fans. Eat, Pray, Love was #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list for over a year and has been translated into over thirty languages. Gilbert has appeared as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the book, and Time magazine named her to their 2008 List of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.

After graduating from New York University, she used money earned while working at a diner to travel, as she says “to create experiences to write about, gather landscapes and voices.” Her work for Spin magazine caught the eye of editors at GQ, which proved to be fertile ground for Gilbert, resulting in a run of colorful profiles and stories that eventually turned into books and movies. Gilbert muses, “I think my gift as a human is that I can make friends with people very quickly. . . . Everything I learned about being a journalist I learned by being a bartender. The most exquisite lesson of all is that people will tell you anything.”

Upon the release of Pilgrims, Gilbert’s collection of short stories, author Annie Proulx praised her as “a young writer of incandescent talent.” Pilgrims received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The author was also nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her nonfiction account of the back-to-basics woodsman Eustace Conway in The Last American Man.

Elizabeth Gilbert – writer’s official site.

After watching the video below I just knew I had to see her live. She is a remarkable and beautiful woman.

“Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.”

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