Selected Shorts: The MacDowell Colony: A Centennial Celebration

The MacDowell Colony: A Centennial Celebration
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) and others who’ve been nurtured and inspired by the isolation and vital community of The MacDowell Colony introduce short stories by emerging writers who have also spent time there. James Baldwin called it a place “to crouch in order to spring.”

Performance playlist:

Remarks by Monique Truong
The Modern Age
by Frances Hwang
read by Dawn Akemi Saito

Remarks by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Proposition
by David Bezmozgis
read by Paul Hecht

Remarks by Susan Minot
Pilgrims
by Julie Orringer
read by Jill Eikenberry

David Bezmozgis moved to Canada when he was six, leaving Latvia during the exodus of the Soviet Jews. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won the 2005 Canadian Jewish Book Award and the 2005 Danuta Gleed Award, and was short listed for both the Governor General’s Award and the Guardian First Book Prize. Natasha and Other Stories has been translated into 12 languages. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Best American Short Stories 2005. He was in residence at MacDowell this year.

Jill Eikenberry starred in Broadway productions of Moonchildren, Watch on the Rhine, Summer Brave, Onward Victoria and All Over Town. Off Broadway, she appeared in Uncommon Women and Others and Eccentricities of a Nightingale, and won an Obie Award for her performances in Lemon Sky and Life Under Water. She earned a Golden Globe Award and five Emmy Award nominations as Ann Kelsey on NBC’s L.A. Law. Her films include Between the Lines, Arthur and Hide in Plain Sight. She received the Humanitas Prize for Destined to Live, a breast cancer documentary she co-produced and hosted on NBC. Most recently, she appeared in A Picasso at Manhattan Theatre Club. She and her husband, Michael Tucker, recently debuted a cabaret show based on the story of their 35-year relationship which will be presented at venues throughout the country in the coming year.

Jeffrey Eugenides received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review and Granta 54: Best of Young American Novelists. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was adapted into a major motion picture, directed by Sofia Coppola. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Foundation for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Harold D. Vursell Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recently he was a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the German Academic Exchange Service and of the American Academy in Berlin. He now teaches at Princeton University. He spent time in residence at MacDowell in 1994 and 1996.

Paul Hecht has performed in Selected Shorts at Symphony Space and around the country every year since the show’s first season. His theatre work includes Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Tony Award nomination, 1968), The Invention of Love, 1776, Noises Off and Pirandello’s Henry IV (Obie Award, 1990). He appeared in the Stoppard/Previn theatre piece Every Good Boy Deserves Favour with the Philadelphia Orchestra and performs a program of John Donne sonnets with the early music group Parthenia. He has recorded audiobooks of works by Annie Proulx, Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, Thomas Mann and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Frances Hwang was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and Colgate University. Two of the stories in her collection, Transparency, were selected by Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose to appear in Best New American Voices. She was in residence at MacDowell in 2003.

Susan Minot received an MFA from Columbia University and studied writing and painting at Brown University. Her novel Monkeys was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her other three novels are Folly, Rapture and Evening, which was recently adapted for the screen. She collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci on the screenplay for the film Stealing Beauty. She has also published a collection of short stories, Lust & Other Stories, and a collection of poetry, Poems 4 A.M. Her stories have been published in Grand Street and The New Yorker. She was in residence at MacDowell in 1984.

Julie Orringer has published a collection of stories, How to Breathe Underwater. Her stories have also appeared in The Paris Review, The Washington Post, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and The Best American Non-Required Reading 2004. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. She is a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan. She was in residence at MacDowell in 2005 and 2006.

Dawn Akemi Saito is an actress, performance artist, writer and Butoh-influenced dancer/choreographer. Her performance, dance and choreographic credits include Delusion of the Fury, Arden/Ardennes, Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, My House is Collapsing Toward One Side, Deshima, She Wolf and Hiroshima Maiden. Her own work, including the pieces “Knock on the Sky,” “Blood Cherries” and “Ha,” has been performed at the Orpheum Theatre in Austria, the Whitney Museum, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Theater Workshop, New World Theatre, LaMaMa E.T.C., the Public Theater, The Walker Art Center and The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts.

Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law. She was a New York City attorney but gave it up to write. Truong was an editor for the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, has been awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award. She is a 2007-08 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She was in residence at MacDowell in 2005.