Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Carolyn Kormann

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2023

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose recent work includes a profile of the chef Sean Sherman, a series on the pandemic, and features addressing issues she has often covered: climate change, energy, and the environment. Previously, she was a web editor and a deputy head of fact checking for the magazine; she also contributed essays on swimming, time, books, mules, and John Donne’s erotica.

Her story about an unusual restaurant in Bolivia, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” won a best-food-coverage award from the James Beard Foundation in 2016. Kormann’s writing has also appeared in Harper’s, Daedalus (the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences), Porter, NPR Music, and VQR, and has been noted by the Best American Science and Nature Writing (2017) and the Best American Travel Writing (2010).

She has received a fellowship from New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, and an Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.

While at MacDowell, Kormann wrote four chapters of her first book, a work of narrative nonfiction featuring reportage, natural history, travelogue, and memoir, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. The book originates, in part, from several stories she published in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer.

Studios

Sorosis

Carolyn Kormann worked in the Sorosis studio.

Sorosis Studio was funded by the New York Carol Club of Sorosis. The small, masonry studio was designed by F. Winsor, Jr., the architect who also designed Savidge Library (1926) and Mixter Studio (1927). At the time of construction, the large porch on the southeast façade offered a spectacular mountain view that has since been obscured…

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