Violet Kupersmith
Photo by Adriana De Cervantes
Bio
Violet Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel and the novel Build Your House Around My Body, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and which is currently being translated into three languages. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, she taught English with the Fulbright Program in the Mekong Delta. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2015-2016 David T.K. Wong writer-in-residence. She has previously lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in the U.S.
In the period of elation/disbelief/relief following the news that I was chosen for a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, it was particularly humbling to look at the names of former NEA fellows with the knowledge of all the extraordinary books that lay in their future, that were being fed by this very award. How honored and grateful my unborn book and I are to be a part of this legacy. The NEA provides the gift of security and the gift of time, which together will allow me to enter this period of un-knowing—the pushing off into darkness of starting a new novel—without fear.
And in my fallow times to come, inevitable in the writing life, I know that I will be sustained by thinking back to the utter joy I felt when I received the phone call from Washington, DC. In that moment I so truly felt that our stories do matter, that we deserve to tell them and have them be heard, that everything we have devoted to them has been worth it.