- Amy Hempel is the 25th Zale Writer-in-Residence
- 14 - 20 March 2010
- Posted June 2, 2009
Amy Hempel was born in Chicago in 1951. She lived in Denver and San Francisco before moving to New York to work in publishing. With the publication of her first book of short stories, Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985), Amy Hempel earned a reputation in the vanguard of American short story writers. One of the stories from that collection, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” is one of the most extensively anthologized stories of the last quarter century. Her three succeeding collections, At the Gates of The Animal Kingdom (Knopf, 1990); Tumble Home (Scribner, 1997) and The Dog of the Marriage (Scribner, 2005) received rave reviews and increased her high stature as a writer of short fiction.
The stories from all four all four previous collections were gathered in a single volume and published by Scribner in 2006. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. In addition, the collection won The Ambassador Book Award from the English Speaking Union as the best fiction of the year, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was also named one of the best books of 2006 by Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York. Hempel also won the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2008 and the PEN/MALAMUD Award for the Short Story in 2009.
Amy Hempel has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inaugural fellowship from the United States Artists Foundation as well as the Mary Frances Hobson Medal and a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize among others. She has taught writing at Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, Duke, Columbia, and now teaches writing at Harvard. She lives in New York City.
The public is invited to the reading below. There
is no charge for admission. For questions please contact Charlotte
D'Ooge at cdooge@tulane.edu or (504) 314-2721.
A READING WITH AMY HEMPEL
7:30 pm, Monday 15 March 2010
Kendall Cram Lecture Hall, Lavin-Bernick Center
Reception to follow in the Qatar Ballroom
Coordinated through the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women,
and facilitated by a committee composed of Newcomb-Tulane College
students, faculty, and Newcomb staff, the Zale Writer-in-Residence
program was established by Dana Zale Gerard, Newcomb College 1985, and
made possible by an annual gift from the M.B. and Edna Zale Foundation
of Dallas, Texas. Since 2006, the Program has been generously supported
by Barnes & Noble College Booksellers.
