Members of the 2019 faculty have been earning wide acclaim for their latest work.
Faculty poet Forrest Gander won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his latest collection, Be With, “a collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.” The New Yorker wrote of the collection, “Poetry often creates a supernatural-seeming rapport with the dead, but rarely has the communication between worlds felt so eerily reciprocal.”
This spring, fiction faculty member Mitchell S. Jackson earned plaudits for his latest book, the memoir Survival Math, which NPR called a “spellbinding narrative.” In early May, fellow fiction faculty member Julie Orringer’s second novel, The Flight Portfolio, was published. The Boston Globe writes, “Part real history and part love story, it’s also a deeply moral work, asking tough question about what matters most to us personally — and to the world.”
Orringer’s portrayal of Varian Fry has also generated some literary controversy, with Cynthia Ozick’s review in the New York Times prompting responses from Fry’s family and other authors. In his letter, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Andrew Sean Greer wrote, “If only there were a medium in which we could use empathy to imagine the thoughts of others, whose history has been erased, while signaling to readers that what they are reading is well-researched conjecture! What luck, we do: the novel.”
Gander, Jackson, Orringer, and their colleagues on the conference faculty will present talks on writing craft and read from their works at public events during conference week, July 28 – August 2. Stay tuned for the detailed schedule!
