Alumna Alexandra Kleeman '12 Wins 2020 Rome Prize

Alumna Alexandra Kleeman ’12, who earlier this year was awarded the Berlin Prize, has now also received the equally prestigious and highly competitive Rome Prize, which offers fellows the opportunity to stay in Rome for four to seven months.

In their press release, The American Academy in Rome states, “Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition.”

With the help of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, Kleeman will work on her latest novel, The Taxon Cycle, from January to August 2021.

“The Taxon Cycle is a quasi-utopian novel, written in five parts, about the rise and fall of money,” according to Kleeman’s statement for the American Academy in Rome. “Each part is set on a different island and in a different time period...each section explores a distinct site at which the utility and valuation of money is in flux, and could be uprooted...The novel considers the island as a site where nature sets into motion ‘evolutionary experiments’ and asks what other types of relationships between life and necessity could exist in the absence of capitalism. By exploring such transitional moments, I hope to give a sense of the horizons of our monetary systems, and to gesture toward other shapes our economies could take.”

Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.

In Berlin, Kleeman will work on another upcoming novel, Something New Under the Sun, forthcoming from Hogarth Press.