Thank you Kate.
Oh, well, this is great.
We have three writers who graduated from the program come
to read and a whole bunch of us that are
in love with the written word.
Cara Blue Adams is remembered around here,
not only for her fine fiction but for her warmth
and her generosity in the classroom.
She has been winning so many honors and accolades
in the past several years that it would be a challenge for her
to keep her website up-to-date.
But we can tell you that among other things
she has published regularly in such top magazines
as Granta, Epoch, and the Kenyon Review.
She was profiled in Poets & Writers,
was a New York City emerging writer fellow,
a visiting scholar of interdisciplinary studies
at Concordia University in Montreal,
and the recipient of the Meringoff Prize
in fiction from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics,
and Writers.
Her wonderful story collection, You Never Get It Back,
won the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize, a great honor,
and was published by the University of Iowa in 2021.
The collection went on to be named a New York Times Editors'
Choice.
It could easily be classified as a novel without the padding,
said the Times' review of the book.
While each episode is somewhat discrete,
this carefully curated collection
forms a greater and more satisfying
whole than the sum of its happy and sad parts.
And it is happy and sad.
It was quite a chore for me to get
myself a way to do other things while I was reading the book.
Adams spent five years on the Southern Review Editorial Board
and subsequently became the review's co-editor.
Currently she's associate professor at Seton Hall
University where she also directs the campus reading
series, Poetry-in-the-Round.
She's completing a book length lyric essay, Weather,
about climate change, and a novel, Removal,
set in Boston shortly after 9/11,
and focusing on immigration law.
It is delightful to have her here.
[APPLAUSE]