WHO WISC Fellow-in-Residence Anne Valente
WHAT: WISC Fellow-in-Residence Anne Valente talks about her novel
WHEN Thursday January 17, 2018 4:45pm
WHERE Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe 107 W Barcelona
Presentation info
The Women’s International Study Center presents a reading and talk with Fellow-in-Residence, author Anne Valente. Her third novel is about a witchcraft archivist from Salem, Massachusetts, who travels to Santa Fe on a yearlong grant to research three women who fled the Manhattan Project to take up residence on their own - women subsequently rumored to be practicing witchcraft. The archivist occupies the house these women formerly lived in, which neighbors claim is haunted, and contemplates her own life ahead of her. During this year in Santa Fe, she befriends an ornithologist studying bird populations, as well as a member of the National Stamp Advisory Committee who is in Santa Fe to research explorer Forrest Fenn as a possible subject for a US stamp. Their lives intersect through curiosity about their new city, and through their interest in its history and land.
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, released from William Morrow/HarperCollins in 2016 and was selected as a Midwest Connection Pick and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. Her second novel, The Desert Sky Before Us, is forthcoming from William Morrow in Spring 2019. Her short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize (2014), and she is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics, which was re-released by Bull City Press in 2017.
Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize and a 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award Finalist Prize. She was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a featured author at the 2015 One Story Debutante Ball, and a Walter E. Dakin Fiction Fellow at the 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. This January, she will be a Fellow-in-Residence at the Women’s International Study Center. Her work was selected as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2017, and her essays appear in The Believer, Catapult, The Rumpus and The Washington Post.
She holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in upstate New York where she teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.
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WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM MANAGER’S NOTE WISC brings incredible scholars, artists and others to Santa Fe as fellows-in-residence. We hope you will attend their presentations, meet our fellows and support this important work by becoming a member.
Sincerely,
Jordan Young
Executive Director
Women’s International StudyCenter
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