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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction - Class of Spring 2012


Karen Russell is an author and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. She was featured in the New Yorker’s fiction issue and on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award. Her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), earned her recognition as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. Her second book, Swamplandia!, a novel about a shabby amusement park set in the Everglades, was published in February 2011. It was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. She has also won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011, earning her a slot as writer-in-residence at Bard College for a semester. Russell has taught fiction and literature at Columbia University and Williams College.

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