For Immediate Release March 19, 2002
Contact: Alisa Giardinelli 610.690.5717 [email protected]www.swarthmore.edu
Swarthmore College Hosts Women Crime Writers Conference
Swarthmore College will host a symposium, "Private Eye / Public 'I': Female Crime Writers of the 21st Century," in the Scheuer Room of Kohlberg Hall on Saturday, April 6. Featured authors are Val McDermid, Barbara Neely, and S.J. Rozan. (See below for author information.) The event will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
"These authors stretch the conventions of the genre in intriguing ways and make innovative choices when it comes to who they put at the center of their books," says Professor of English Literature Nathalie Anderson, who organized the event and is using their work in her class, 'Cherchez La Femme: The Mystery of Woman in the Mystery Genre.' "The literature is entertaining, yes, but it's also compelling, serious, and empowering."
Anderson's class gives her a way to use popular culture not only to introduce students to feminist and narrative theory, but also to address social issues. She says today's women detective novelists expose racial tensions, class divisions, and multiple injustices as they write about crimes that victimize women and about the ways women fight back against victimization. "This popular genre -- shockingly and intriguingly -- allows us to get pleasure from the concept of violence," she says. "For all of us, especially in the shadow of September 11, how do we think about murder for pleasure?"
The event is sponsored by the Departments of English Literature, Black Studies, Women's Studies, and the Cooper Foundation. For more information, please contact Nathalie Anderson at (610) 328-8141 or [email protected] near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college with an enrollment of 1,450. Swarthmore is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.
About the Authors
Val McDermid is the Oxford-trained Scottish author of 16 mystery novels. Among them: the Lindsay Gordon series, which features a feminist journalist; the Kate Brannigan series, which features a female private detective; and the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series. Her novel A Place of Execution (2000) won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A lesbian feminist journalist, McDermid continues to write occasionally for national newspapers and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.
Novelist and short-story writer Barbara Neely is the award-winning author of five mystery novels that feature Blanche White, an African American domestic worker and accidental sleuth. Neely has served as the executive director of Women for Economic Justice and as a radio producer for Africa News Service. She is also the host of Commonwealth Journal, a radio interview program in Massachusetts.
S.J. Rozan is the author of eight novels featuring detectives Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. She has won the Shamus Award for Best Novel for Concourse (1996) and the Anthony Award for Best Novel for No Colder Place (1998). In addition to running an on-going series of panels on crime writing and the American imagination, Rozan is an architect in a New York firm whose practice includes police stations, firehouses, zoo buildings, and the largest terra cotta restoration project in the world.
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