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A Reading by Joanna Scott
The Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Joanna Scott reads from her work, followed by a conversation with Dinaw Mengestu
Monday, April 1, 2019
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
 [A Reading by Joanna Scott] On Monday, April 1, at 7:00 p.m. in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), novelist Joanna Scott reads from her work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature and writing professor Mary Caponegro, and followed by a conversation with Dinaw Mengestu, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books by Joanna Scott will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

Exploring subjects ranging from beauty and temptation to the motion of thought and the elusive potential of the imagination, Joanna Scott’s publications include Various Antidotes: Stories and the novel Arrogance, both PEN/Faulkner finalists; The Manikin, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Follow Me, a New York Times Notable Book. Her most recent novels are Careers for Women (2017) and De Potter's Grand Tour (2014). Scott has written about modern and contemporary authors including Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald, Maureen Howard, William Gass, and J.M. Coetzee. Her play, Speakeasy, was produced by the Todd Theater Troupe at La MaMa and toured fringe festivals around the world.

Scott founded and directs The Inspiration Project, a volunteer literacy program for adults with developmental disabilities. She is a founding board member of the literary press Open Letter, and she is a contributing editor of Bard’s literary journal, Conjunctions, which published her story “Infidels” in the Fall 2018 issue, Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity.

Scott received her master’s degree from Brown University and has taught creative writing at Brown, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University; she is currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester. Scott is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 
PRAISE FOR JOANNA SCOTT
 
“The wit, the magical prose and the daring devices of Scott’s writing create an enchantment . . . her soundings of the depth of our natures are as accurate and revealing as Thoreau’s measurements of Walden Pond.” Nation

“A greatly gifted and highly original artist.” New York Times Book Review

“Scott writes with the crispest and most telling of sentences. Her grasp of the mysteries within us is profound.” Newsday

“Scott’s prose is sensitive and beautifully crafted . . . Her characters are both eminently human and touched with magic and mystery.” Washington Post Book World

“One of the finest writers of her generation: elegant, sublime, of the earthy earth.” —Paul West

“What most amazes me about Joanna Scott’s extraordinary narratives is the vastness of the world her imagination ranges through and the rich, Dickensian variety of voices and characters one encounters.” —Robert Coover

Contact: Nicole Nyhan, [email protected], 845-758-7054

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In Print

Vol. 79
Onword
Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

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March 22, 2023
To survive sadly is still. 
At a boat’s bottom, allegedly a boat. 
Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. 
Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. 
The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. 
Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus. 

Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. 
No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. 
No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam. 

We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
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He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit. 
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When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.