Reading: Karen Russell + Fiona Maazel
The U.S. Embassy Literature Serie: The U.S. Embassy in cooperation with Veranstaltungsforum der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, the American Academy Berlin, and the English Theatre Berlin presents
A joint reading with Karen Russell, American Academy Spring Fellow 2012, and Fiona Maazel, Picador-Guest Professor at the University of Leipzig - Thursday, May 24 / 7pm
Karen Russell will read from Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her a new collection of short stories
Fiona Maazel will read from her forthcoming novel Woke up Lonely
Moderator: Gregor Dotzauer
Fiona Maazel was born in Cleveland in 1975. She received a Master of Arts from William College in 1997 and a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College in 2002. Fiona Maazel is the author of the novel Last Last Chance. She is the winner of the Bard Prize for 2009 and a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" honoree for 2008. Her work has appeared in Bomb, Book Forum, The Common, Conjunctions, Fence, The Mississippi Review, the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Salon, N+1, and The Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and just finished work on her next novel, Woke up Lonely. She is the holder of the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature in the summer term of 2012.
Karen Russell received a B.A. from Northwestern University in 2003, and graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University in 2006. She was Margaret Bundy Scott Visiting Professor of English at Williams College. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope.
She was named a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" young writer honoree at a November 2009 ceremony, for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and received the Bard Fiction Prize for it in 2011. Her second book and first novel, Swamplandia!, about a shabby amusement park set in the Everglades, was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. It was also included in the New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2011."She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, for Spring 2012.
In 2007 the University of Leipzig in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange Service and the Veranstaltungsforum der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck initiated the Picador-Guest Professorship for Literature at the University of Leipzig.