November 5, 2014
Fiction writer Hester Kaplan to read from her work on Friday
On Friday, Nov. 7, fiction writer Hester Kaplan will read from her work at 3:30 p.m. in Town Hall at the Leadership Studies Building. The event is free and open to the public.
Kaplan is the author of "The Edge of Marriage," 1999, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; "Kinship Theory," 2001; and "The Tell," 2013. Her stories and nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series in 1998 and 1999, Ploughshares and Glimmer Train.
Her most recent story collection, "Unravished," earned advance praise from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
Recent awards include the Salamander Fiction Prize, the McGinness-Ritchie Award for Non-Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is on the faculty of Lesley University's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
"In her stories, Hester Kaplan creates a remarkably detailed world, at once familiar yet new and beautiful. Her characters are intelligent, verbal and self-aware, but all of them teeter on the brink of collapse. And while she is keenly aware of the cultural pulse of our times, she always foregrounds the drama of personal, often familial relationships," said Katherine Karlin, associate professor of English. "It's the intimacy of those relationships that makes her fiction so compelling."
Kaplan's reading is sponsored by the department of English and the Creative Writing Enthusiasts. A book signing will follow the reading.