Visiting Faculty Fiction Reading: Pamela Erens and Janice Obuchowski

Pamela Erens is the author of the novels Eleven Hours, The Virgins, and The Understory. She has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Eleven Hours, Erens’s most recent novel, was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, NPR, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and the Irish Independent. Erens’s essays and criticism have appeared in venues such as Vogue, Elle, The New York Times, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. Reader’s Digest named Erens one of “23 Contemporary Writers You Should Have Read by Now.”

Janice Obuchowski’s fiction has twice received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies—in 2017 and 2019—and her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions online, LitHub, and elsewhere.  She earned her BA from Cornell University, her MA from the University of Virginia, and her MFA from UC Irvine.  She’s served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and as a fiction editor for the New England Review.