Bard Fiction Prize Winner Karen Russell To Give Reading at Bard College on February 6

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Writer in residence Karen Russell will read from recent work on Sunday, February 6, at Bard College. The free program begins at 7:00 p.m. in the Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Russell received the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2011 for her book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Random House, 2006), of which the Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Her marvelous collection of stories might be read by some as ‘surreal.’ But, in fact, once the reader is acclimated to the unfamiliar places Russell spins into being, any sense that one is being narrated through some dreamscape quickly evaporates. Minotaurs, underwater ghosts, feral wolf girls, post-prophetic insomniac boys—these characters become our fictional intimates, ones we find ourselves relating to and embracing, ones we ultimately begin to understand are mirrors into our own experience. To read Russell’s stories is to enter into realms that are simultaneously inviting and appalling, bewitching and bewildering, lonely and loving, fantastic as an unbridled vision and familiar as a teaspoon.”

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in both The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue and New York magazine’s list of 25 people to watch under the age of 26. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award. Her fiction has recently appeared in Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, Conjunctions, and The New Yorker, which first published her story “Haunting Olivia” in its 2005 debut fiction issue. Twenty-nine-years old, she lives in New York City.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October, continues Bard’s long-standing tradition as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction to pursue their creative goals and provide an opportunity to work in a fertile and intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to writer Samantha Hunt for her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

For further information, call 845-758-7087 or e-mail [email protected].
 

TO DOWNLOAD a photo of Karen Russell, go to: www.bard.edu/news/press.

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This event was last updated on 01-11-2011

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