Ciment will read from her 2005 novel, The Tattoo Artist, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize at the University of Rochester earlier this year. The novel details the life of a young American artist during the 1920s and 1930s who travels, along with her husband, to the South Pacific in search of native art. The couple is stranded on an island famous for its full-body tattooing and, after the tragic death of her husband, the artist turns her skin into a tattooed expression of love and loss.
Ciment is also the author of the novels The Law of Falling Bodies and Teeth of the Dog and a short story collection titled Small Claims; one of the stories, "Astronomy," received the Discovery Prize from Chanticleer Films/Columbia Pictures and was made into a film for American Playhouse. Ciment has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She is a professor of English at the University of Florida.
The $5,000 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.
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