Please join us on Tuesday May 7th at 7:00 pm for a reading by Gwen Kirby, 2018-2019 George Bennett Fellow. Gwen Kirby’s stories appear or are forthcoming in One Story, Tin House online, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. Her story “Shit Cassandra Saw . . .” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2018 and it also appears in the 2018 Wigleaf Top 50. Kirby’s story “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” won the 2017 DISQUIET Literary Prize for Fiction. She has received two Pushcart Prize special mentions and has been awarded scholarships to the Rivendell Writers’ Colony and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.
Kirby has taught at Johns Hopkins University and was an instructor at the University of Cincinnati for five years, leading courses in English composition, fiction, poetry and more. She joined the fiction faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference in summer 2017.
The George Bennett Fellowship celebrates its 51st anniversary this year. Established by Elias B.M. Kulukundis ’55 in honor of PEA English Instructor George Bennett, the one-year fellowship has provided writers “of outstanding promise” with the support they need to pursue their craft.
The reading will be held in The Class of 1945 Library’s Rockefeller Hall and is free and open to the public.
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