Postcards from the Gerund State follows a group of women academics, mostly in the visual and literary arts, as they adjust to the hilarious surprises of life at Birnbrau, a fictional women’s college in Georgia with its own characteristic dysfunctions. In the culminating novella that concludes the collection, the group attend a residency at a Wyoming artist colony where for a full month, they cannot avoid or escape each other, as much as they might wish for it. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “an empathetic, often savagely comic portrait of the struggles of working women in what might be deemed an elite profession.”
Lorraine M. López
Lorraine M. López is the Gertrude Conaway professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches in the MFA program. She is a cofounder of the Latino and Latina Studies program at Vanderbilt and an associate editor of Afro-Hispanic Review. She is also the author of six previous volumes of fiction, including Homicide Survivors Picnic (BkMk Press), finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Additionally, she has edited three essay collections. Her awards includes the inaugural Miguel Marmól Prize, the Paterson Prize for Young People’s Literature, the Texas Writers League Award for Outstanding Fiction, International Latino Book Award, Independent Publisher Award, Foreword Award, and Borders/Las Comadres Selections. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.