Conversations from the Cullman Center: Homestead: Melinda Moustakis with Danielle Evans
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree Melinda Moustakis discusses her novel about the turbulent marriage of two homesteaders in 1950s Alaska.
For Lawrence, 150 acres of Alaskan wilderness is an opportunity; for Marie, marrying the man she meets at the Moose Lodge is a chance to escape an empty future. Together in a territory on the verge of enormous change, Lawrence and Marie settle on stolen land, fitting their hard-wrought lives together. Melinda Moustakis's debut novel is a depiction of small intimacies and sweeping currents, an unflinching vision of both a new marriage and a territory becoming a new state.
Melinda Moustakis wrote Homestead as the 2017-2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss the book with fiction writer Danielle Evans.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in California. Her debut story collection, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 selection. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Granta, and Kenyon Review, and she has been awarded the O. Henry Prize. She is a recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction. At the Cullman Center, she was the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow.
Danielle Evans is the author of two award-winning story collections, The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, and The Sewanee Review and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University.
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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.