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
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Karen Russell, Young Novelist, Wins $500,000 MacArthur Grant!
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
President of The Poetry Foundation Reads Today
Robert Polito, award-winning writer and poet, and new president of The Poetry Foundation (which boasts an astounding $200 million endowment from philanthropist Ruth Lilly), will present a free reading as part of the New York State Summer Writers Institute tonight. He will share the stage with novelist Ann Beattie.
Polito is also director of the writing program at The New School in Manhattan, and a past winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson, Savage Art.
His latest book is the poetry-prose hybrid collection Hollywood and God (2013).
Here is the title poem, which starts "If only God would save me / I would know how to hurt you."
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/page_1/
Full schedule of free readings: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html