Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Mississippi – The winner of the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction – one of the United States’ most prestigious literary awards – will appear next month at Mississippi State University as part of the university’s Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series.

Acclaimed novelist Claire Jiménez will speak at MSU on Sept. 9 and read from the novel that won her the award, “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” a book to be published by Grand Central Publishing in 2023. The event is free and open to all and begins at 5:30 p.m. in the John Grisham Room of the Mitchell Memorial Library. There will be a question-and-answer session and a book signing afterward.

“Dr. Jiménez’s latest work explores the intersection of identity and trauma, highlighting the complexity and resilience involved in the journey of healing and self-discovery,” Olufunke Ogundimu, assistant professor of English at MSU, said of the book, which centers on the disappearance of a Puerto Rican teenager who vanished without a trace as a child. “It really explores how families get through difficult times and find themselves again.”

In addition to her award-winning novel, Jiménez is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories, a 2019 publication of Johns Hopkins University Press that won the New York Society Library’s Hornblower Award. A native of Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York, she is a lecturer at the University of South Carolina. Jiménez holds a Master of Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

The Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series, sponsored by the Department of English at Michigan State University, was established through an endowment by Alice Carol Caldwell and her family in memory of her late husband, a Michigan State University English professor who died in 2015. Caldwell was the founder and director of the university’s creative writing program and served as president and vice president of the Southern Literary Festival organization.

For more information about Jiménez’s visit, contact Becky Hagenston, director of creative writing in MSU’s English department, at [email protected].

MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and Department of English can be found online at www.cas.msstate.edu and www.english.msstate.edu.

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