The Literary Luncheon series will continue this spring with three events hosted by Cornell President David Skorton and Professor Robin Davisson at their Cayuga Heights home.

The first event Feb. 10 will feature Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, speaking about Ernest Hemingway's Havana and the work of the Standing Committee on Libraries and Archives of Cuba to preserve his works and other important literary and cultural treasures. The event is free and open to the first 25 people to sign up at special-events@cornell.edu by Feb. 5.

Upcoming events will feature Irakli Kakabadze, a fiction writer and visiting scholar in government and the Peace Studies Program, March 31; and Martha Collins, a poet, translator and distinguished visiting writer at Cornell, April 21.

A light lunch is provided at 11:30 a.m. followed by presentations with featured guests from noon-1 p.m. The series is sponsored by the Office of the President.

"Literature is an oral art, and a lot of folks have forgotten about that," Skorton said at a December luncheon with James McConkey, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature emeritus.

McConkey came to Cornell in 1956, beginning his career as a fiction writer. He is an acclaimed essayist and memoirist, writing personal narratives from his experiences. His books include "Crossroads," "The Telescope in the Parlor: Essays on Life and Literature" and "Court of Memory."

"Memory is a fiction, but it is a fiction that is true to us," McConkey said.

As examples of his craft, he read from "Fireflies," a piece first published in 1977 in the New Yorker, and "What Kind of Father Am I?" about parenting sons and, when older, being parented by them; published in 2008 in The American Scholar.

"You'll get a sense of the way that at least this writer's mind works," he said of the two selections.

"Fireflies" is the story of a story, related by the narrator's wife who was told of a colleague's bicycle trip across Germany in 1936. As she tells the tale, they think of their children and hope for a better world; the narrator sees fireflies and remembers his youth during the Depression.

"I couldn't write 'Fireflies' today because the intuitive connections are beyond me," McConkey said. "I don't know how I did it."

In the 2008 story, McConkey recounted wandering off the trail while on an Adirondack hiking trip with his three adult sons. "Being old, we were no longer in charge," he said.

The fall 2009 series also featured Alice Fulton, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English, who read from her poetry and short fiction from her 2008 collection "The Nightingales of Troy" in October.

Katherine Reagan, the Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, was the speaker in September. She brought some rare books from the collections (including the First Folio of Shakespeare and one of founding President A.D. White's Civil War scrapbooks) and discussed the library's exhibition on Abraham Lincoln's presidency.