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by Mary Biddinger (Author)
Against the backdrop of a boozy, restless late-90s Chicago, creative writing graduate student Mary Van Pelt and her eccentric roommate navigate the collision between party life, domestic harmony, and academic ambition in The Girl with the Black Lipstick.
Biddinger offers vivid, surreal vignettes told in the heat of the moment or recalled as we follow Van Pelt from her first days of graduate school into life as a tenured professor. Our heroine and her roommate overcome predicaments and deepen their bond while simultaneously ignoring and obsessing over the future, blissfully unaware of challenges ahead until those challenges arrive. Whether teaching literature as graduate assistants, acting in strange minor film roles, or translating mysterious texts, the roommates live large and prepare for eventual fame. Sitting in a creative writing workshop, Van Pelt wonders, " Is it possible to be the heroine, and the villain, in your own work of fiction, but unintentionally?" The Girl with the Black Lipstick is a tale of deep creativity and found family, paying tribute to those who support our youthful selves in unexpected ways.Author Biography
Mary Biddinger's debut work of fiction is The Girl with the Black Lipstick, a novella in linked flash stories. She is also the author of numerous books of poetry, including Department of Elegy and Partial Genius: Prose Poems. Biddinger is co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program, and has received awards and fellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts.
