GoodWorld Journeys: Authors Mary Karr & George Saunders Teach Writing on Patmos, Greece

Bestselling writers Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club, Lit, and The Art of Memoir) and George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December, Pastoralia) taught a ten-day reading & writing Salon for GoodWorld Journeys on the Greek island of Patmos in July 2018. They will return to teach the Salon on Patmos in 2021 (June 13-23). Details at www.goodworldjourneys.com. Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club (1995), Cherry (2000), and Lit (2009). She most recently wrote The Art of Memoir (2015), which Cheryl Strayed calls "the definitive book on reading and writing memoir for years to come." She is The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, having taught memoir writing for 30 years. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays and has published five celebrated volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), Sinner’s Welcome (2006), and Tropic of Squalor (2018). She has received multiple grants including the Whiting Writer’s Award, PEN’s Martha Albrand Award, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. George Saunders, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the winner of the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). His novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, won the Man-Booker Prize in 2017. His work includes the short-story collections “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award), “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation” (a finalist for the Story Prize), and “Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness.” Saunders has won prizes for his best-selling children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” and for a book of essays entitled “The Braindead Megaphone,” He teaches at Syracuse University.