Celebrated Author Melissa Pritchard to Give Reading at Bard College

CELEBRATED AUTHOR MELISSA PRITCHARD TO GIVE READING AT

BARD COLLEGE ON MONDAY, APRIL 23

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — On Monday, April 23, at Bard College, award-winning author Melissa Pritchard will read from her new fiction collection, The Odditorium. Pritchard will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

Melissa Pritchard is the nationally renowned author of four short story collections: The Odditorium,Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, and Disappearing Ingenue, and three novels, Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, and Late Bloomer. She is also the author of Devotedly, Virginia, a biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia Galvin Piper. Spirit Seizures, a New York Times Notable Book, received both the Flannery O’Connor and Carl Sandburg awards. The Instinct for Bliss, also a New York Times Notable Book, received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and Disappearing Ingenue, a Doubleday “Fiction for the Rest of Us” selection, was chosen to appear on National Public Radio’s 2002 Summer Reading List.Selene of the Spirits was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and Late Bloomer, a 2004 Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year selection described as “ravishing” in Vanity Fair, received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.

Pritchard’s short stories are frequently anthologized and cited in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards,The Pushcart Prize, Best of the West, Best American Short Stories, the Prentice Hall Anthology of Women’s Literature, and numerous other anthologies and college textbooks. Pritchard’s fiction has appeared in more than fifty renowned literary journals, including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Agni,Ecotone, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, and Conjunctions, the innovative literary magazine published by Bard. Her book reviews, essays, and journalism pieces have appeared in O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine; The Nation; the New York Times Book Review; and Chicago Tribune Books. Her essay “A Solemn Pleasure,” published in Conjunctions: 51, The Death Issue, edited by Morrow and guest coeditorDavid Shields, has been reprinted in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, W.W. Norton, 2011, also coedited by Morrow and Shields. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including, among others, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, and the Illinois Arts Council. Pritchard teaches at Arizona State University and has served as judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is also the founder of the Ashton Goodman Grant, working with The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (www.awwproject.org) to provide funding for the education and literacy of Afghan women and girls.

For more information about this event, contact conjunctions@bard.edu or call 845-758-7054.