Kate Moses, whose novel Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, will read from her work at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester’s River Campus. The Kafka Prize is awarded annually to female authors of exceptional works of fiction by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of English.
The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing and is free and open to the public.
Wintering (St. Martin’s Press, 2003) has been praised for its rich, lyrical prose and its insightful and intelligent look into Plath’s life, the breakup of her marriage to poet and short story writer Ted Hughes, and her eventual suicide. Moses’s novel follows Plath’s life as she completes the Ariel series of poems and moves to London with her two children, only to fall ill and accidentally run into her husband’s lover. The novel has been translated into seven languages, including French, Spanish, and Chinese.
Moses was born in and lives in San Francisco. She has worked as an editor in publishing and as literary director at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. In 1997, she became one of two founding editors of Salon.com’s “Mothers Who Think” Web site. Moses is co-editor of the anthology Mothers Who Think, which won the American Book Award in 2000. Wintering is her first novel.
The Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize was established in 1976 as a tribute to the memory of Janet Kafka, a young editor whose untimely death ended a career many felt would have furthered the causes of women and literature. Previous winners have included Toni Morrison for Song of Solomon and Gail Godwin for A Southern Family.
For more information, contact (585) 275-8318.