Mary Gordon
April 27–28, 2009
- Reading (Introduction by Kristen Martin): Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Discussion: Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Photos from Gordon's visit
- 2009 Fellows seminar notes
Bio
Mary Gordon's body of work -- novels, short stories, essays, and personal memoirs -- paints a rich picture of the complexities of faith, morals, politics, and religious and cultural heritage in a contemporary landscape. Regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of modern Catholic life in America, Ms. Gordon's writing deals with growing up as a Roman Catholic and with the nature of goodness and piety as expressed within that tradition.
Ms. Gordon has won three O. Henry Awards. She has also won the Story Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kafka Prize, and the New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. In 2008 she was named the New York State Author. Ms. Gordon is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing at Barnard College.
The author of several bestselling novels, including Final Payments, The Company of Women, and Pearl, Ms. Gordon has published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life, a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter, and a book of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls. She has also written The Shadow Man, a memoir about her father, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who died when she was seven, and most recently Circling My Mother, about her mother, who struggled with senile dementia in the last years of her life. In its review of Circling My Mother, the Boston Globe wrote, "Mary Gordon is a brilliant writer in all senses of that word; a gifted craftsperson, original scholar, unflinching observer of self and others."
Photos
