(LENOX, Mass.) – Authors Sue Miller, Patricia Park, and Dayna Tortorici will conclude their three-week residencies at The Mount with Writers in the House, a public conversation, on Wednesday, March 18, at 5pm. The writers will discuss their past and present work, their careers, and their experience writing in the home of Edith Wharton. They will also touch on the legacy of Wharton and her continuing influence on women writers. Author Elissa Altman will moderate the conversation.

Admission is free; space is limited; reservations are required.

Miller, Park, and Tortorici were selected from a pool of over 70 applicants for The Mount’s 2020 Edith Wharton Writers-in-Residence program.

This is the seventh year of the Edith Wharton Writers-in-Residence program. Each spring, The Mount offers a residency to three women writers by providing workspace at The Mount, off-site accommodations, and a $1,000 stipend to support their creative work. Past participants include National Book Award finalist Julia Philips, Pulitzer Prize-winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, and Elif Batuman, who recently wrote the foreword for Penguin Classics centennial edition of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

“We are very pleased to be able to promote and support creative writing, with a particular focus on women,” says Susan Wissler, executive director of The Mount. “The challenges that Wharton faced as a female writer still occur today, so we are happy to be a champion of female writers.”

Sue Miller has written 10 novels, including The Good Mother and the Oprah Book Club selection, While I Was Gone. Her latest novel, Monogamy, will be published in 2020. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Kate Chopin Prize, and she has been short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award and long-listed for The Orange Prize. Miller will use her time at The Mount to begin her next writing project.

Patricia Park is a 2009 Fulbright scholar and an assistant professor of creative writing at American University whose novel, Re Jane, was selected for the American Library Association’s 2016 Reading List. Park will use her time at The Mount to work on revising her next novel, El Chino, which explores the lives of Koreans in Argentina during the Dirty War.

Dayna Tortorici is a co-editor-in-chief of literary magazine n+1. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, as well as The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Tortorici will use her time at The Mount to continue working on her first novel.

 

The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home is a National Historic Landmark and cultural center that celebrates the intellectual, artistic, and humanitarian legacy of Edith Wharton (1862-1937), one of America’s greatest authors.

The Mount presents Wharton’s life and achievements through interpretation, programs, and tours of her house and gardens. The Mount is the literary hub of the Berkshires and hosts lectures by national authors and scholars, panels, and an annual writers-in-residency. Additional events include live theater, jazz evenings, outdoor sculpture exhibits, and bird walks.