Bard Fiction Prize Winner Bennett Sims To Give Reading at Bard College on February 24

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bennett Sims, Writer in Residence at Bard College, will read from his work on Monday, February 24. The free program begins at 7:00 p.m. in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium in Bard’s Reem-Kayden Center. Sims received the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize for his debut novel, A Questionable Shape (Two Dollar Radio, 2013). In this penetrating story set in Baton Rouge, about a son looking for his undead father, Sims transcends traditional zombie narrative to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss. Sims is at Bard for the spring 2014 semester.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The judges delight in welcoming to the literary community of Bard a writer whose first novel represents a powerful (and very readable) fusion of genres—a story about the vagaries of human perception which is also a wild romp of zombies biting through a curiously lyrical apocalypse. The writing is intricate, thoughtful, its characters are like most of us obsessed with games and devices, the text bejeweled with footnotes. The author was one of the last students of David Foster Wallace, who was the first reader of the first version of this haunting novel of love and estrangement.”

Bennett Sims was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has studied at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a Provost Fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus Award after graduating. A Questionable Shape was published in 2013 by Two Dollar Radio. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

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CAPTION INFO: Bard Fiction Prize Winner Bennett Sims will read from his work at Bard College on Monday, February 24 at 7 p.m. in the Reem-Kayden Center, László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College.
PHOTO CREDIT: Carmen Machado

This event was last updated on 01-28-2014

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