Author to serve as first McNeely Creative Writer in Residence
February 27, 2020
Author Susan Steinberg will be in residency March 9-April 3 as part of a new program at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.
Steinberg is the first McNeely Creative Writer in Residence, hosted by the Literary Arts Institute (LAI) at CSB.
As the McNeely writer, Steinberg will visit classes, share meals with faculty and students and give two presentations.
Steinberg will present a reading of her creative work at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 10 at room 204, Gorecki Center, CSB. She will also conduct a craft talk at 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 24 at the Gallery Lounge, Benedicta Arts Center, CSB. Both events are free and open to the public.
“A craft talk is an opportunity for the writer to discuss elements of composition,” said Matt Harkins, professor and chair of the English Department at CSB and SJU and the director of the LAI. “This will be an opportunity for us to hear Susan explain her methods for approaching different artistic challenges.”
Additionally, Steinberg will mentor nine CSB/SJU creative writing undergraduates in individual meetings, providing constructive feedback and advice about the students’ work.
Steinberg’s first novel, “Machine,” was published by Graywolf Press in August 2019. “It is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose previous book, ‘Spectacle’ (Graywolf Press 2013), gained her a rapturous following,” according to the Graywolf website.
“Machine” revolves around a group of teenagers — both locals and wealthy out-of-towners — during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.
“Steinberg shifts backward and forward in time, just as her prose shifts into a kind of poetry,” wrote The New Yorker magazine. “The result is a glittering, knifelike reflection of despair through the eyes of a young woman, made richer by the fact that it’s told in hindsight.”
Steinberg is also the author of two additional short story collections, “The End of Free Love” (2003) and “Hydroplane” (2006).
She is a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of San Francisco.
Steinberg received a bachelor’s degree in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a master’s in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award.
Her stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review and other journals and magazines.
The McNeely Creative Writer in Residence was established with the generous help of the Manitou Fund, and is named in honor of Donald McNeely, who was a major supporter of the LAI.