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Seton Hall University

Poetry-in-the-Round Hosts Award-Winning Essayist and Fiction Writer Courtney Zoffness  

Picture of Courtney ZoffnessPoetry-in-the-Round hosts award-winning essayist and fiction writer Courtney Zoffness on Wednesday, April 19 at 7 p.m. ET in a free online event.

Courtney Zoffness is the author of Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s, 2021), named a best nonfiction debut of the year by BookPage and Refinery29, and a “must-read” by Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, and Good Morning America.

Spilt Milk, a memoir-in-essays about motherhood, family life, and the question what we inherit and how we learn to navigate the world, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which praises the book as “Keenly perceptive … masterful essays in a fresh, vulnerable voice readers will want to hear more of.” The Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “Spilt Milk explores the physicality of the body and how generational memory, anxiety, and disappointment entwine within us to conceive life. These are essays about pain. About belief. About desire … a window into the experience of how we both inherit and pass on different parts of ourselves.” Spilt Milk also grapples with spiritual faith, and the Jewish Book Council calls it “A powerful exploration of a range of experiences that many women face . . . full of acute observations.”

A fiction writer as well as a memoirist, Zoffness has been honored with the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 38 countries. Other honors include an Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Center for Fiction and two residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and other venues.

Zoffness directs the creative writing program at Drew University. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

The event is free and open to the public. All are welcome. Register here.

About the Series:

Poetry-in-the-Round has brought some of the best contemporary writers from around the world to Seton Hall University for the past three decades. Some of those visitors have included Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Dinaw Mengestu, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Ben Lerner, Téa Obreht, Brandon Taylor, Parul Seghal, Elif Batuman, Christine Schutt, Heidi Julavits, Ben Marcus, Jenny Offill, Gary Shteyngart, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Karen Russell, Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Major Jackson, Deborah Eisenberg, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Russell Banks, C.K. Williams, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and many others. The series has worked to bring established and up-and-coming new writers to the attention of Seton Hall students and the community.

Categories: Arts and Culture