Virtual Author Series: Joanna Biggs, Richard Scott Larson, and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
Help us welcome three writers from our first Willa Cather Residency for Writers cohort as they share recent publications! Joanna Biggs, Richard Scott Larson, and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum will all read excerpts from their books as they reflect on their unique writers in residence experiences.
A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs explores the writing habits and working conditions of notable women writers such as George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sylvia Plath juxtaposed against the social and cultural expectations that influence the creative lives of all women.
The Long Hallway chronicles author Richard Scott Larson's search for identity in his childhood. Although his upbringing had the air of suburban safety, Larson was nevertheless subjected to threatening experiences that made a lasting impact that also fostered a lifelong interest in film.
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's Elita tells the story of a child development scholar living in the Pacific Northwest in 1951 who encounters a nonverbal child who has been discovered loving in the woods near a local penitentiary. Tensions emerge as the community learns more about this child and her connection to long-held local secrets.
This event is free with online registration.
The views expressed in this program are not necessarily the views of the Willa Cather Foundation.
Joanna Biggs
Joanna Biggs explores the intellectual, creative and romantic possibilities for women’s lives outside of motherhood and marriage. She is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and her book of essays about women writers, A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, was published in May, 2023. (Photo credit: Hillery Stone)
Richard Scott Larson
Richard Scott Larson writes about the lingering effects of the closet for queer people in a climate where the dominant narrative often overlooks childhood experiences of shame, fear, and isolation. He grew up in rural Missouri but has lived in New York for two decades, where he works as a program administrator at NYU. He has recently received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2025) and the forthcoming short story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and will be released in the fall of 2025. Her three previous collections of short fiction are What We Do With the Wreckage (2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, University of Georgia Press in October, 2018), This Life She’s Chosen (2005, Chronicle Books) and Swimming With Strangers (2008, Chronicle Books).