5 X Friday: Professor Julie Schumacher

Intent on figuring out how to construct solid plots, Professor Julie Schumacher wrote her first book for younger readers in 2004, a decade before young adult fiction became so popular it spawned an abstinence movement. Schumacher's third such effort, The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), won a Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. This summer she shows off her plot chops with the adult comic novel Dear Committee Members, a book consisting only of fictional letters of recommendation--from a single imagined Creative Writing professor--that nevertheless contains classic (and compelling) exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement. Indeed, as an admiring Slate review points out, what finally happens in the tale "turn[s] the book's theme upside down," revealing the moral weight beneath the undeniably funny characterizations. For Schumacher's favorite novel-in-letters and other revelations, read on.

New Creative Writing Program Newsletter

Check out the Spring 2012 Alumni Newsletter from the Creative Writing Program for news and features about alumni, current students, and faculty. The issue features interviews with Director Julie Schumacher, about her new book for young adults, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls, and with Professor Charles Baxter, recent winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Finally, congratulations to this spring's graduates of the MFA program, who defended their creative theses earlier this month (photo left): Elizabeth Abbot, Lucas de Lima, Sarah Fox, Alex Grant, Amir Hussain, Chris Keimig, David Malley, Wahida Omar, Claire Stanford, Molly Sutton Kiefer, and Andrea Uptmor.

New Faculty Books

Start your summer reading now! Associate Professor Katherine Scheil this spring published She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press, 2012), a fascinating look at how book clubs provided encouragement for female literary education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and a path into public life. This is Professor Scheil's third book. In May, Professor Julie Schumacher publishes her fifth book for younger readers, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (Delacorte, 2012). She won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award for her novel The Book of One Hundred Truths.

Alumni and Faculty Celebrate Mother's Day

Garrison Keillor (BA '66), wearing his bookstore owner hat, is presenting "Honor Thy Mother," a free reading 3 pm, Sunday, May 13, with Regents Professor Patricia Hampl, Professor Julie Schumacher, MFA alumna Shannon Olson, and Keillor himself. The event, sponsored by Keillor's emporium, Common Good Books, takes place at Macalester College's Weyerhaeuser Chapel (St. Paul). Professor Hampl and Keillor were editors together at the University of Minnesota undergraduate literary magazine Ivory Tower. Keillor and Olson, the author of Welcome to My Planet: Where English Is Sometimes Spoken, once taught a class together on comedy writing at the U.

Schumacher Receives Bellagio Residency

Professor of English Julie Schumacher has been awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy for spring 2011. Schumacher plans to work on a collection of short stories, "Passengers."