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KAREN RUSSELL READING AT BARD COLLEGE

by Editor

On Monday, April 8, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Bard Fiction Prize winner, and New York Times bestselling author Karen Russell will read from her work. Russell’s highly acclaimed 2011 novel Swamplandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2011, and a recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her other work includes the short story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the just-​​published Vampires in the Lemon Grove, praised by NPR as “one of the most innovative, inspired short-​​story collections in the past decade.” Joy Williams wrote in the New York Times that Russell’s “work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled.” Russell will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

One of today’s most celebrated and vital writers, Karen Russell was writer-​​in-​​residence at Bard College in 2011 and recipient of the 2011 Bard Fiction Prize. Russell has been honored in the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best writers under the age of 40, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and by the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” program. Three of her short stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes. She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and was a spring 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Her stories have been featured in Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, the New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. Russell received her B.A. from Northwestern University, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

For more information about this event or to be placed on the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series e-​​mail list, contact conjunctions@​bard.​edu or call 845 – 758-​​7054.

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