Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, has agreed to serve as the professional judge for the 2009 Nick Adams Short Story Contest. Open to any student at an ACM college, the Nick Adams Contest celebrates Ernest Hemingway’s young hero and the creative impulse of ACM students. Ms. Niffenegger’s creative impulse has produced numerous art works, several visual and graphic novels, and two novels.
Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), Niffenegger’s debut novel, has been translated into over thirty languages. Warner Bros./New Line Cinema expects to release a film version, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, later this year. A love story about a “temporally challenged” man, the novel features vivid Chicago settings, including the Newberry Library, and compelling meditations about marriage, loss, free will, and change.
Her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, will be published in October. Harry N. Abrams has published two of Niffenegger’s visual novels, Three Incestuous Sisters (2005) and The Adventuress (2006). Other visual books include Spring (1993), The Spinster (1986), Aberrant Abecedarium (1986) and The Murderer. Recently, her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile (2008) was serialized in the London Guardian and can be viewed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/nightbookmobile.
Audrey Niffenegger was born in South Haven, Michigan, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. Ms. Niffenegger received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s of fine arts degree from Northwestern University. She is one of the founders of the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and teaches in the Center’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Book Arts.
Ms. Niffenegger’s work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Newberry Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Temple University. She has received several awards and fellowships including a Union League Art Scholarship from the Union League Civic Arts Foundation, a George D. and Isabella A. Brown Travelling Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an Artist Grant from the Vogelstein Foundation. Ms. Niffenegger has also been a Ragdale Fellow numerous times and has received funding from the Illinois Arts Council. Her art work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Spertus Museum at Chicago’s Institute of Jewish Studies, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
More information is on Audrey Niffenegger’s website.
The Nick Adams Short Story Contest, held annually since 1973, offers a prize of $1,000 for the best story by a student at an ACM college. The prize was given by an anonymous donor to encourage young writers. The results of the competition will be announced in early May.
