Two-Time Super Bowl Champion Bill Curry to Join Best-Selling Author Steve Almond for Working Writers Series

Two-time Super Bowl champion Bill Curry and best-selling author Steve Almond will take part in a panel titled “Is Football Dead? Writings For and Against,” for the final installment of the fall Working Writers Series on Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library.

Jonathan Mulrooney, associate professor and chair of the English department, will moderate the discussion. The event, sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the English department, and the Barrett Chair of Creative Writing, is free and open to the public.

Curry is a two-time Super Bowl champion who played in two National Football League Pro Bowls. His 10 seasons in the NFL included playing for the Green Bay Packers, Baltimore Colts, Houston Oilers, and Los Angeles Rams. In 1976, after his pro football career, Curry began coaching as the offensive line coach at Georgia Tech. He spent the next three years as assistant coach for the Green Bay Packers. After returning to Georgia Tech, Curry was named Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year in 1985, having led Georgia to a 9-2-1 season and its first bowl victory in 13 years. He later coached for the University of Alabama and Kentucky State University, and became the first head football coach at Georgia State. He was named Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year, 1989; Bobby Dodd National Coach of the Year, 1989; and winner of the President Gerald R. Ford Legends Award, 2008. Curry’s career also includes time spent as an ESPN commentator, during which he regularly shared his thoughts on football with a worldwide audience. He is the author of “Ten Men You Meet in the Huddle: Lessons from a Football Life” (ESPN, 2008) and has written numerous columns for ESPN.com.

Almond spent seven years as a newspaper reporter in both Texas and Florida before publishing his first book, the story collection “My Life in Heavy Metal” (Grove Press, 2003). He has published three other collections of short fiction, and his stories have appeared in the annual Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His most recent collection, “God Bless America” (Lookout Books, 2011), won the Paterson Prize for Fiction. Almond is also the co-author of “Which Brings Me to You” (Algonquin Books, 2006), a novel that he wrote collaboratively with Julianna Baggott, Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at Holy Cross. He has published several books of nonfiction, including “Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America” (Mariner Books, 2005), a New York Times bestseller that won the American Library Associate Alex Award and was named the Book Sense Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year. Almond also works as a journalist, reporting on a wide range of subjects for outlets including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, and teaches nonfiction narrative in the Nieman Fellowship Program at Harvard University. His most recent book, “Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto” (Melville House, 2014) is a New York Times bestseller.