The 2007 Kafka Award Winner
This year the 2007 Recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman is Miranda Beverly-Whittemore for her novel "Set Me Free."
Come meet the author!
Book reading & award ceremony, followed
by an hors d’oeuvres reception & book signing.
Books will be available
for purchase at the event provided by Campus Bookstore.
This event is free and open to the public.
Monday, November, 3rd
5-7pm
Hawkins-Carlson Room
Rush Rhees Library
Ms. Beverly-Whittemore will also be visiting in the Department of English and
presenting at an undergraduate English class this day.
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About the book
Inspired by The Tempest—whose last words are "set me free"—Beverly-Whittemore's novel reverberates with the ambitions and foibles of liberal ideals, the dangers of protecting children from the sins of their fathers, and the boisterous voices of Neige Courante students. In its frank depiction of fatherhood and friendship, race and class, love and devastation, Set Me Free is moving, funny, incisive, and above all, wise. Publisher's Weekly has noted that the book's "allusions to Shakespeare and shifts in time and perspective make for an intriguing read."
“This impressive novel combines multiple narrative perspectives to tell the story of Elliot Barrow, the founder of Ponderosa Academy, a secondary school for the children of the Neige Courante, a Native American tribe in Oregon. Only through the gathering of key players in Elliot’s past does the full story of the academy’s founding and Elliot’s own secret tragedy come to light in this sensitive account of complex family relationships.”
-Stephanie Li, Assistant Professor of English & 2007
Janet Heidinger Kafka Award Committee Member
About the Author
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1976. The daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, she moved to Senegal, in West Africa, when she was three. Her family conducted ethnographic research in a small Mandinko village there for nearly three years. After three intervening years in rural Vermont, by the age of nine she was living in Portland, Oregon, where she stayed until her 1994 graduation from the Catlin Gabel School. She subsequently attended Vassar College, where she received the Fiction Prize, and from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1998, with general and departmental honors. After graduating, she worked for nearly three years at the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City, where she helped curate the main reading series and writing program.
It was while working at the Unterberg Poetry Center that Miranda wrote the first draft of The Effects of Light, which was published by Warner Books in February 2005. Called an "ambitious first novel" by the New York Times, it was a Booksense recommended book of the month. Miranda was invited to be a participant in that spring's First Fiction Tour, during which she traveled with three other first-time novelists on a tour of pubs spanning the country, from Boston to Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Seattle, Los Angeles and Austin. She was also honored to be included in the Christamore Book and Author Benefit in Indianapolis, as well as the New Voices program at Misty Valley Books in Chester, Vermont. The Effects of Light has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Polish, French and Swedish.
Miranda wrote her second novel, Set Me Free, in the fall of 2005, and the book was published by Warner Books in March 2007. Publisher's Weekly has noted that the book's "allusions to Shakespeare and shifts in time and perspective make for an intriguing read." Miranda writes full-time from the home she shares with her husband in Brooklyn.
About the Award
THE JANET HEIDINGER KAFKA PRIZE FOR FICTION BY AN AMERICAN WOMAN
Since 1976, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester have awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman. The idea for the prize came out of the personal grief of the friends and family of a fine young editor who was killed in an automobile accident just as her career was beginning to achieve its promise of excellence. She was 30 years old, and those who knew her believed she would do much to further the causes of literature and women. Her family, her friends, and her professional associates in the publishing industry created the endowment from which the prize is bestowed, in memory of Janet Heidinger Kafka and the literary standards and personal ideals for which she stood.
Each year a substantial cash prize is awarded annually to a woman who is a USA citizen, and who has written the best book-length work of prose fiction, whether novel, short stories, or experimental writing. We are particularly interested in calling attention to the work of a promising but less established writer.
About the Committee:
This year's Committee members were:
Janet Berlo, Art & Art History,
Stephanie Li, English and
Kathy McGowan, Rush Rhees Library