Joanna Scott is a highly acclaimed award-winning novelist, short story writer, and the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her breakthrough novel, Arrogance, a beautiful literary portrait of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, earned her a PEN-Faulkner nomination. Her novel, The Manikin, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize andhailed as “sensitive and beautifully crafted” (The Washington Post Book World). A prolific writer of ten novels and two short story collections, Scott has been a recipient of both MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships as well as a Lannan Literary Award. In her newest collection of stories, Excuse Me While I Disappear (Little, Brown, April 2021), Scott shines her lyrical mastery and “incandescent imagination” (Publishers Weekly) on a topic that’s both timeless and timely: the universal struggle to connect. In her lectures, Scott delves into her writing process, how she harnesses the power of imagination on the page, and the themes she explores throughout her collection of works.
