Brockport Writer Receives Fairchild Award

Judith Kitchen, writer in residence in the English department at SUNY College at Brockport, has been named the recipient of the Lillian Fairchild Award.

The annual award, which is administered by the Department of English at the University of Rochester, is presented to a Rochester area resident who has produced the best visual, literary, or musical work of art. Kitchen is being honored for her book The House on Eccles Road.

Kitchen's novel follows a middle-aged woman, still grieving over the loss of her only child eight years earlier, on her wedding anniversary. Structured like James Joyce's Ulysses to take place in a single day, the work also received the S. Mariella Gable Prize presented by Graywolf Press. The Library Journal gave the book a starred review, Publishers Weekly described Kitchen's writing as "powerfully direct," and the Los Angeles Times called Kitchen a "fine, imaginative writer."

Kitchen is the author of Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford; Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory; and a book of poems, Perennials, for which she won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts, and she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

The Fairchild Award was established by Herman L. Fairchild of the University's Department of Geology in memory of his daughter, an accomplished designer who died of tuberculosis at age 32. The first award was given in 1924. Previous winners have included Garth Fagan, director of Garth Fagan Dance, architect Frank S. Grosso, and novelist Andrea Barrett.