Award-winning novelist Karen Russell visits USC Aiken for annual writers series

Mar. 20—USC Aiken's Spring 2024 Oswald Distinguished Writers Series featured award-winning novelist Karen Russell, who spent Tuesday speaking to students in writing classes before a book reading and signing event.

Russell's accolades include the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, "Swamplandia!," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2011.

The author visited Roy Seeger's editing and publishing class and Andrew Geyer's fiction workshop class, where students who have been studying Russel's writing had a chance to ask her questions about her creative process and her experience as a novelist.

Russell talked about how her own time in college helped push her towards becoming an author.

"That's the power of professors like Roy and [Andrew], that just open up a lot of doors," she said.

"It's really an honor to be part of the Oswald Writers Series," she said. "It's fun for me to be on a campus that is clearly so tight-knit and so nurturing of students.

"It's a good thing to be here at this place where so many of you have echoed back to me that to be an educated person means that you know what your gifts are and you know how to give them to the world."

Russell also spoke about leaning into the strangeness of her work, which often blends elements of science fiction and magical realism. "I do think 'weird' is a compliment [because] it means that you're getting at something true about just being alive," she said.

Geyer talked about the impact of having writers like Russell on campus for students: "To be able to be in a class with that person whose book you read, talk to that person about how that book came to be and what the struggles were ... and then to come and see what that looks like on stage in front of people, I mean that's the kind of thing that inspires you to go and do that yourself."

Geyer said he was "just blown away" by Russell's reading performance on Tuesday night, where she read from her first short story collection, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves."

The USC Aiken Oswald Distinguished Writers Series is an annual event hosted by the university's English Department.

"The writers series has been going on for more than 30 years, and we've had a lot of big-name writers," said Geyer.

The series was made possible through a 1995 endowment by James and Mary Oswald, two longtime Aiken residents who were passionate about literature and the arts.