NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Award-winning novelist and short story writer Nancy Reisman will teach at Vanderbilt University beginning this fall, as a master‘s program in creative writing begins to take shape at the university.
Reisman, author of the short story collection House Fires and 2004 novel The First Desire, moves to Vanderbilt as an assistant professor from the University of Michigan, where she was the Helen Herzog Zell Visiting Associate Professor.
“I love working with new writers,‘ Reisman said. “There seems to be a real effort to bring people together in community at Vanderbilt. I‘m excited about helping my colleagues shape this new program so it earns the kind of profile that Vanderbilt has in so many other areas.”
Reisman, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., earned her master of fine arts from the University of Massachusetts. Her fiction has appeared in 2001 Best American Short Stories, Glimmer Train and Kenyon Review, and her story Tea was included in the anthology The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.
House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture awarded The First Desire the 2005 Samuel Goldberg Jewish Fiction Award in June. The New York Times named The First Desire as a notable book of 2004.
The First Desire tracks the disappearance of a woman in 1920s Buffalo, and how it impacts her extended family.
“(Reisman) reveals her scenery as artfully as a master cinematographer, and she‘s a sure shot with the killing detail,” wrote Marianne Wiggins in the San Francisco Chronicle. Terry Miller Shannon observed on bookreporter.com that
“Reisman paints gorgeously haunting descriptions.”
“The characters and their stories are subtle and real. Just as in real life, there are no stereotyped personalities and no overly neat conclusions.”
Reisman says she is “obsessed with sound, the music of the language.”
“I‘m interested in ordinary life,” Reisman said, “the riches and doubts of ordinary lives. Most lives are actually very heroic.”
Preliminary plans call for Vanderbilt to begin accepting applications for its master of fine arts in creative writing this fall, with the first class meetings in the fall of 2006.
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu