Award-winning novelist Michael Kimball served as the Spring 2014 Kratz Writer-in-Residence at Goucher College. Professor Kimball taught English 300, an advanced fiction workshop, on Wednesday evenings from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in the Kratz Seminar Room (Julia Rogers Room 228) and conducted independent studies. Professor Kimball also read from his work on Wednesday April 2, 2014 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Batza Room of the Athenaeum. A limited supply of Michael Kimball’s books are available for Goucher College creative writing students and select members of the Goucher community within the Writer’s Corner of the Soper Room in the Julia Rogers Building at Goucher College.
Michael Kimball received a Boswell and Johnson Award, the Lidano Fiction Prize, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His novels include the following:
1) Big Ray, about a son’s reckoning with the outsized influence of his tempestuous, obese father;
2) Us (originally published in the United Kingdom under the title How Much of Us There Was), about a man who struggles with losing his wife;
3) Dear Everybody, which features the unsent letters and testaments of a man who committed suicide;
4) The Way The Family Got Away, about a family confronting the death of their infant brother.
Professor Kimball is the author of Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (On A Postcard), a performance art project featured on NPR and covered in the Guardian. In this project, strangers lined up to share the intimate details of their lives while Professor Kimball wrote spontaneously created micro-biographies for them as they waited. In the end, more than 10,000 years of lives were condensed into just over 300 postcards. Along with human lives, the postcards contain the life stories for cats, dogs, a rooster, an apple, a bar of soap, a t-shirt, a chair, and a horse.
As Andy Devine, Professor Kimball also published Words, a book that includes two alphabetical lists (words that should and should not be used), a grammar on fiction writing, nine alphabetical stories, a 90K-word novel (condensed to 20 pages) and an Afterword by the author.
Professor Kimball’s short fiction appears in literary magazines like Open City, Prairie Schooner, Post Road and Gigantic. Both Stephen King and Dave Eggers selected Professor Kimball’s novel Dear Everybody for their lists of notables in The Best American Series Best American Short Stories and Best American Non-Required Reading. Oprah Winfrey’s Reading List characterized Professor Kimball’s novel Us as “The best little novel you haven’t heard about.”
Professor Kimball is the founding editor of Taint Magazine and, with Luca Dipierro, he produced two documentaries, I Will Smash You and 60 Writers/60 Places.
For more information about Michael Kimball, visit his website at www.michael-kimball.com.
Please note: Michael Kimball should not be confused with the screenwriter, novelist, and professor who shares his name and who teaches at the University of Southern Maine.