Author Tom Sancton discusses his writing career and recent memoir at Tulane on Tuesday (Oct. 10).

The Davis Washington Mitchell Reading Project Lecture presents a talk with author Tom Sancton at Tulane University's Freeman Auditorium at the Woldenberg Art Center on Tuesday (Oct. 10) at 7 p.m. Sancton will discuss the writing process, his career as a journalist and novelist, and his memoir, Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White, the summer reading project book for this year at Tulane. The event, sponsored by the Tulane Reading Project, is free and open to the public.

The book is a tale of Sancton's unusual childhood experience growing up in New Orleans with the music and ways of veteran jazzmen of the 1950s and '60s.

Sancton, who currently lives in Paris with his wife and two children, was introduced to the world of New Orleans jazz by his father, Tulane alumnus Tom Sancton, a former writer for the New Orleans Item and the Times-Picayune.

Sancton is former Paris bureau chief for Time. In 22 years with the magazine, he wrote more than 50 cover stories. In his parallel career as a writer and jazz clarinetist, Sancton has appeared at major festivals around the world and has recorded more than a dozen albums. He also appeared alongside Woody Allen in the 1998 film "Wild Man Blues."

Sancton has a bachelor's degree in American history and literature from Harvard College and a doctorate in European history from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He has written extensively on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and was co-author in l987 of a Time book, Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography. In 1998, he co-authored the international bestseller Death of a Princess: The Investigation.

The goal of the Tulane Reading Project is to provide new students with a shared intellectual experience through the reading and discussion of a common book, as well as special programs related to that book. Each year, a committee of faculty, staff and students chooses the summer reading book. For more information, call 504-314-2974 or contact tides@tulane.edu.