New School Faculty Members Win High Praise for Literary Debuts
A pair of writers and professors at The New School have earned lofty praise for their “stunning” literary debuts.
Robin Beth Schaer, part-time lecturer at Parsons School of Design, and Wendy S. Walters, associate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, were named two of “the most exciting new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in 2015” by Buzzfeed Books recently.
Schaer won praise for Shipbreaking, her first poetry collection, which Buzzfeed writer Jarry Lee describes as “a stunning, intimate debut that will sweep you away with its lyrical current.”
“Everything feels connected—sea, land, beauty, loss—in this passionate ocean of a book,” she adds of Shipbreaking, which was also named to BuzzFeed’s 16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 list.
Meanwhile, Lee Lauded Walters’ prose collection, Multiply/Divide, as an “insightful debut” that “seeks to capture the cultural essence of places in the U.S. and the people who live there—cities like Manhattan, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.—while smartly reflecting on the influence of race and class on both.”
“The essays in Multiply/Divide bend the lines between memoir and essay, fiction and nonfiction, but each one will make readers re-examine the places and communities and other aspects of American life we try to belong to,” she adds.