Discipline: Literature – fiction

Terese Svoboda

Discipline: Literature – fiction
Region: New York, NY and Victoria, CANADA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1979, 2013, 2022

Terese Svoboda is the author of the forthcoming Dog on Fire and Roxy and Coco (her seventh and eighth novels) as well as a biography of the proletarian modernist Lola Ridge (20), which recently received a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Grant. She has also written eight books of poetry, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent (a memoir that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize), and a book of translations from the Nuer people.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, Paris Review, NY Times and its review, Granta, and many other magazines. Narrative Magazine is featuring her second Story-of-the-Week in 2022. She has won the Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation video prize, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.

At MacDowell in 2013, she enlarged the 56 pages of Irish Princess, the beginnings of a novel that won her a Guggenheim. The story is about a young girl and a member of the Peerage who runs off with a priest to Jamaica. During her 2022 residency, Svoboda wrote 100 pages of Goose Girl, her ninth novel, combining the fairytale of six brothers who become enchanted geese and the 2016 death of 10,000 geese at Berkeley Pit in Montana.

In 2024 the New York Times did a double review of her two new books, the speculative novel Roxy and Coco and her third story collection that won the Juniper Prize, The Long Swim. Portions of both were written at MacDowell.

Studios

Garland

Terese Svoboda worked in the Garland studio.

Marian MacDowell and friends originally named this studio in memory of Anna Baetz, the nurse who helped care for Edward MacDowell in the waning years of his life. With generous support from the Garland family, the studio was renovated in 2013 and renamed the Peter and Mary Garland Studio. The inward opening, diamond-pane windows were replaced…

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