Suzanne McConnell

Author Suzanne McConnell and John W. Kluge Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin in 2021 discusses her collaboration with the late Kurt Vonnegut on Pity the Reader, a style and advice book for aspiring writers.

Suzanne McConnell is a writer, editor, and educator. She taught writing and literature at Hunter College for thirty years and was the Scholar/Facilitator in Literature and Medicine at two New Jersey hospitals—the University of Medicine and Dentistry and the Department of Veteran Affairs. Since 2006, she has been fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.

McConnell’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications including the Huffington Post, Provincetown Arts, Waterstone Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Saint Ann’s Review, The Fiddlehead, and Poets & Writers, among others, and her work has been translated into Chinese, for the Yangtze River Series. A student and friend of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, McConnell’s short memoir about him was published in The Brooklyn Rail; the book she co-authored with Vonnegut, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style, was published by Seven Stories Press in 2019.

Twice nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, McConnell has held writing residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her stories have won first prizes in the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest and Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest.

McConnell holds a BA in sociology from the University of Arkansas and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She and lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

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This event is a collaboration between Bard College Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin.