Personal essayist Kim Dana Kupperman is Fairfield University's Inspired Writers' first guest author September 30 | Press Releases

Image: Kim Kupperman Fairfield University's "Inspired Writers" series opens with a reading and book signing by Kim Dana Kupperman on Thursday, Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. in the Kelley Center Presentation Room. Michael White, Fairfield University's director of the low residency MFA in Creative Writing program, will introduce the author. Admission is free and the public is welcome to this Arts & Minds series event.

In her critically acclaimed collection of short autobiographical stories, " I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives From the Other Side of Silence," Kupperman, an instructor in the MFA in Creative Writing program, "releases sweet sorrow that is rich and poetic," according to a review in the Feminist Review .

White is delighted to have Kupperman teaching in the MFA program. "Kim is a wonderful writer who is able to transform personal tragedy into public art of a very high form. We are fortunate to have such a talent in our MFA program."

The collection offers personal glimpses of each of the author's parents - both, now, deceased - and of the brother she lost to AIDS. Kupperman was at the center of a vicious custody battle as a child and was given, on her father's deathbed, a mountain of transcripts from this protracted legal fight. Mary Jo Murphy, writing for The New York Times Sunday Book Review section describes this essay as one of "her most haunting ... hundreds of pages of words, in all their ugliness, aren't enough. She finds that she must animate them" with vivid inventions of what her mother might have done or how she might have dressed to win her case. In the end Murphy writes, "Neither we nor Kupperman will ever know, but she makes us feel the yearning right along with her."

Kupperman received the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the founder of Welcome Table Press, dedicated to publishing and celebrating the essay in all its forms. Kupperman is the managing editor of the award-winning quarterly literary journal, The Gettysburg Review , where she also coordinates an annual summer conference.

Tickets are not necessary, but reservations are advised. For further information, please contact Laura Keller at (203) 254-4110, or by e-mail, lkeller@fairfield.edu .