Events
News
Many Columbia alumni and faculty were among those recognized by NPR’s prestigious end of year list.
The School of the Arts is well represented on this years’ prestigious New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, which includes alumni and faculty members working across all genres, and ranges from veterans of the craft to a debut novelist.
2020 is proving to be an eventful year for faculty member and co-head of the TV Writing concentration David Klass.
For alumna Afia Atakora ’16, the 9-month “fever dream” that birthed her novel Conjure Women, written for her master thesis, is now going to be published in the US by Penguin Books.
Pour One Out: Cocktail Odes to TV's Most Dearly Departed, written by fiction alumnus Chris Vola ’10, was published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, last month.
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.