Esteemed author Ernest Gaines and renowned artist Donald Sultan will deliver the UNC Asheville commencement address at 9 a.m. May 12 on the Ramsey Library Terrace. In case of rain, commencement will begin at 10 a.m. at the Asheville Civic Center.

Some 590 students are candidates for bachelorís and masterís of liberal arts degrees. During the ceremony, Chancellor Anne Ponder will also confer honorary doctoral degrees on Gaines and Sultan. Tickets are not required.

Gaines, a professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is acclaimed for his novels and short stories, including ìThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,î which was made into a popular television movie.

Gaines was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1997 novel, ìA Lesson Before Dying,î which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, Southern Book Award, Langston Hughes Award, Louisiana Literary Award and Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award. Gaines is also a MacArthur Fellow, 1993 Louisiana Humanist of the Year and 2000 Louisiana Writer of the Year. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received a National Humanities Medal.

A native of Louisiana, Gaines was among the fifth generation of his family born on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, La., an influence and common setting for his fiction. The eldest of 12 children, he was raised by an aunt in slave quarters on the plantation. His early schooling in the 1930s consisted of six years in the quartersí one-room church and three years at St. Augustine, a Catholic school for African-Americans in New Roads. When he was 15, Gaines joined his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, Calif., because there was no high school available to him as an African-American in rural Louisiana.

Sultan, a successful New York artist, is a native of Asheville and a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree. After receiving a master of fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago, Sultan moved to New York in 1975 to begin his career.

Sultan quickly established himself as a prominent painter, printmaker and sculptor. He has exhibited his extensive body of work in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums around the world.