The Akron Roundtable proudly presents Patrick Carney, Musician, and David Giffels, Author for the organization’s 40th Anniversary Celebration Dinner. The event will take place on Monday, October 3, 2016 at 6:00 PM at the John S. Knight Center, 77 East Mill Street in Akron.

Starting at 6:00 pm, guests will mix and mingle during a festive cocktail party. A seated dinner will follow at 7:00 pm, and the headlining program begins at 8:00 pm, when Patrick Carney of the Black Keys takes the stage in conversation with his friend and author David Giffels.

General Admission reservations for the evening are $75 each. Patron tickets are $125 and include a special Patron Party invitation at 5:30 pm, with an opportunity to meet Patrick Carney and David Giffels. All guests will receive a commemorative gift from Akron Roundtable. For corporate table information, call 330.247.8682. To purchase tickets and for additional information on this and other Akron Roundtable luncheons, visit www.akronroundtable.org.

Patrick Carney is a musician, best known as the drummer for The Black Keys. From Akron, Ohio, Carney teamed up with Akron native, Dan Auerbach in 2001 to form The Black Keys. They released their debut album The Big Come Up less than a year later. That release was followed by Thickfreakness (2003), Rubber Factory (2004), Magic Potion (2006), Attack & Release (2008), Brothers (2010), El Camino (2011), and Turn Blue (2014). Carney and Auerbach record with Nonesuch Records.

As a producer, Carney has worked with independent musicians producing records for groups such as Beaten Awake, Houseguest, Churchbuilder and The Black Keys. In 2011 he produced the second studio album by Tennis, Young & Old (released on Fat Possum Records February 14, 2012), and in September 2012, he produced the self-titled album for Canadian rockers, The Sheepdogs. Carney contributed the main title music to the 2014 Netflix show “BoJack Horsemen.”

In 2009, Carney formed the band Drummer, in which he plays bass. Each of the band¹s members has played drums in another band. He also plays drums on The Rentals’ 2014 album Lost in Alphaville. And, from 2005-2010 he created label Audio Eagle Records with acts such as his own side-project Drummer, Houseguest, and Royal Bangs. Carney moved to Nashville in 2010.

David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose, a collection of linked essays about the quirky, hardbitten cultural landscape of the Rust Belt and the people who thrive there. The book has received widespread acclaim, and was featured as an “Editors’ Choice” in the New York Times Book Review, which declared, “a region on the mend has found its voice.” The book was nominated for the PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

An associate professor of English at University of Akron, Giffels teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.

Giffels’ previous book, the memoir All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, was a critical hit, described by the New York Times as “sweet and funny,” and by the Los Angeles Times as “a truly wonderful book.” It topped the “Fantastic Summer Reads” list in Oprah’s O at Home magazine.

Giffels is coauthor of Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron. He was a longtime columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal and a contributing commentator and essayist on National Public Radio station WKSU in Kent, Ohio. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, ESPN’s Grantland, Redbook and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head.

His recent awards include the Cleveland Arts Prize for literature, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, the Ohioana Book Award, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists award for excellence.