Events
News
One of America’s leading authors, Professor Richard Ford has been awarded the prestigious Hadada Award for lifetime achievement from The Paris Review, joining the distinguished ranks of winners as Joan Didion, William Styron, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth.
Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Anelise Chen was recently selected for The National Book Foundations list of ‘5 under 35’, for her book So Many Olympic Exertions.
Fiction alumna Jenessa Abrams ’17 is having a great year. Recently long-listed for the Berlin Writing Prize for her short story, All American Ghost Busters another one of Abrams’ short fiction pieces, Griddlecakes, or the Word Above Grief was recently released from British-based independent publisher, Platypus Press, as part of their Shorts digital series.
The work of fiction alumna Selena Anderson ’10 seamlessly melds fantasy and realism, evident in her recent collection of short stories, Tenderoni, where she explores race, identity and Black womanhood in the American South.
Muri, a climate fiction chapbook by nonfiction writing alumna Ashley Shelby '02, was published by Radix Media. In this reimagining of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, the polar bear population has dwindled, and the remaining pods have been relocated to the east coast of Antarctica in an attempt to save them using a process called “assisted colonization.” The last pod of Baffin Bay bears has boarded the Precession icebreaker, captained by a man who is keenly aware that previous crews on this run have gone mad.
Alumna Jackie Thomas-Kennedy '06 won the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize for her story, Eugenie is Anointed.
Fiction alumna Casey Plett ‘12 won the $60K Amazon Canada First Novel Award for Little Fish, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Little Fish also won the 2019 Firecracker Award for Fiction. Plett is currently a finalist for the Writers' Trust of Canada's $5,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ emerging writers and Little Fish is shortlisted for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards in the transgender fiction category.
The 2019 Firecracker Award for fiction was awarded last week to alumna Casey Plett ‘12 for her novel Little Fish, published by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Professor Binnie Kirshenbaum’s new novel Rabbits for Food was named An Amazon Best Book of the Month for May 2019 and A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2019, and it's out now through SOHO Press.
Fiction alumnus Aaron Hamburger '01 has a new novel, Nirvana is Here, available through Three Rooms Press. An honest story about recovery and coping with both past and present, framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the wide-reaching scope of the #metoo movement, Nirvana is Here, explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Intertwining stories are reminiscent of the tenderness and haunting nostalgia of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name blended with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics.
Writing professors Susan Bernofsky, Ben Marcus, and current adjunct Mitchell S. Jackson have all been named 2019-2020 Cullman Center Fellows by The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.