Joanna Scott's award-winning fiction is known for its wide-ranging subject matter and its incorporation of historical figures into imagined narratives.
22 Facts About Joanna Scott
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Joanna Scott is currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
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Joanna Scott was born on June 22,1960, the youngest child of Walter Lee and Yvonne Scott.
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Joanna Scott was raised in Darien, Connecticut, with her three older brothers.
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Joanna Scott's father worked in advertising, and her mother was a psychologist for the school system in Stamford, Connecticut.
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Joanna Scott has described her childhood as one of extraordinary freedom but isolation, both of which nurtured her imagination.
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Joanna Scott spent one semester in Rome and one academic year at Barnard College before graduating in 1983.
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Joanna Scott then spent a year as an assistant at a literary agency in New York City before enrolling in the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, where she studied with the authors Susan Sontag, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes.
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Joanna Scott began writing her first novel, Fading, My Parmacheene Belle, while at Brown University.
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At the time of her first novel's publication, Joanna Scott was an instructor at the University of Rochester.
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In 1994, Joanna Scott released a collection of stories, Various Antidotes.
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In 1999, Joanna Scott was appointed the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
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Joanna Scott then took a sabbatical to live in Florence, Italy, where she conducted research and began work on novels set in Italy.
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Joanna Scott was married to the poet and scholar James Longenbach until his death in 2022.
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Joanna Scott has published fiction and nonfiction.
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Joanna Scott is best known for fiction of lyrical prose that explores a wide range of subjects and employs a variety of literary techniques.
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The scholar Anne-Laure Tissut has characterized Joanna Scott's writing as displaying "a fascination for the diversity of the world and an awareness of the wealth of literary devices".
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Joanna Scott has done this by crafting fictions centered on historical figures ranging from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to Egon Schiele to her own ancestors.
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In interviews, Joanna Scott has pointed to the influence of William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Maureen Howard, and John Hawkes on her work.
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Joanna Scott's work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and elsewhere.
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Joanna Scott has been a visiting professor at Princeton University.
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Joanna Scott has been an invited speaker at numerous institutions.