Throughout the semester, guest speakers visit the class and speak of the paths they took in their writing careers. Yet there are so many levels of participation from others in this community.” This upper-level seminar - focusing on creative writing and literary citizenship - is aimed at preparing students for the writing life beyond Kenyon College. Writing itself may be a somewhat solitary activity, but once the story or poem is ‘done,’ we rely on others to read, share and publish our work. The writing and publishing world is one made of relationships. Our literary world is a social ecosystem that relies on others: readers, writers, editors, reviewers, publishers, booksellers and so on. Lori May defines literary citizenship as a "term for engaging in the community with the intent of giving as much as, if not more so, than we take. Keija was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years before her family moved to Austin, Texas. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, Playa Summer Lake, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, where she was a My Time Fellow.
Her short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Review of Books Daily, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Lonely Planet travel-writing anthologies, World Literature Today, Slate, The Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Slice Magazine, Salon, Five Chapters, New Delta Review, Marie Claire, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. John Mandel, and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the Kansas City Star, Lone Star Literary Life, Missouri Life and Vox Magazine. Her second novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was chosen as Book of the Month by Emily St. In fall 2019, it was published in Arabic by the Syrian Ministry of Culture. The novel earned a Michener-Copernicus award, was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize, was chosen as Book of the Month by National Geographic Traveler, and was selected as a Best Book of the Middle East Region 2013 by Turkey’s Today’s Zaman newspaper.
Keija Parssinen is the author of the novel The Ruins of Us, which was published in the US (HarperCollins), UK (Faber& Faber), Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Italy (Newton Compton Editori) and around the Middle East.
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