February 9, 2007
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Russian and American writer Olga Grushin will read from her fiction at 8 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 19, in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Center at Amherst, the reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
A citizen of Russia and the United States, Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and spent her early childhood in Prague. She studied art history at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and journalism at Moscow State University. Grushin later received a full scholarship to Emory University, and became the first Russian citizen to enroll in and complete a four-year American college program, graduating summa cum laude in 1993.
Since coming to the United States, she has been an interpreter for President Jimmy Carter, a cocktail waitress in a jazz bar, a translator at the World Bank, a research analyst at a Washington law firm and an editor at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Her short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Confrontation and Art Times. The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), her first novel—written in English, her third language—was praised by The New York Times as “ironic, surreal, sometimes stunning” and “Gogolesque in its sardonic humor.” Grushin is now at work on her second novel.
The Amherst College Creative Writing Center sponsors a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. For more information, please call 413/542-8200.
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