Karen Russell, Young Novelist, Wins $500,000 MacArthur Grant!

Karen Russell, who visited us in Feb. 2011, is among the 2013 winners of a half a million dollar MacArthur Fellowship (announced today).

From the MacArthur website:  "Karen Russell is a fiction writer whose haunting yet comic tales blend fantastical elements with psychological realism and classic themes of transformation and redemption. Setting much of her work in the Everglades of her native Florida, she depicts in lyrical, energetic prose an enchanting and forbidding landscape and delves into subcultures rarely encountered in contemporary American literature."

See more at:  http://www.macfound.org/fellows/902/

More about Russell's visit to Albany with Julie Orringer:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/orringer_russell11.html