Paule Marshall is the author of five novels: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); Daughters (1991); and The Fisher King (2001). She has also published two collections of short fiction: Soul Clap Hands Sing (1961) and Reena and other Stories (1983). A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Professor Marshall has taught at various universities over the course of her lifetime; she recently retired from New York University where for thirteen years she held the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
News
Class of 2009
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2009 Lifetime Achievement
Paule Marshall
A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Professor Marshall has taught at various universities over the course of her lifetime.
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2009 Fiction
The Boat
Nam Le
Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory […] and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.
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2009 Nonfiction
The Hemingses of Monticello
Annette Gordon-Reed
Professor Gordon-Reed, who grew up in still-segregated east Texas, became interested in Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children’s biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy.
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2009 Fiction
The Plague of Doves
Louise Erdrich
Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.