Now available: Maleficae

GenPop Books author Judith Baumel (The Kangaroo Girl, 2011) has been elected President of the National Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

In a release by Adelphi University, where she is a professor of English and was the founding director of the Adelphi creative writing program, Baumel says she is “honored to represent the diverse literary family that is AWP because my own literary career was nurtured by the organization.”

I look forward to our annual conference, where I reconnect with friends, encounter and present new creative work. And I look forward to leading AWP’s many other literary advocacy projects including our prestigious books prizes, our vibrant print and online publications, our support of teachers of creative writing at all levels and in all places.

I’m honored to be working for AWP with such talented people—the organization’s staff, as well as my fellow trustees. This year’s conference is in Boston, where I lived in the seventies and eighties. That our two keynote speakers—Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott—were in my circle then speaks to their particular generosity and to the way the American literary community makes possible diverse artistic lives. To paraphrase my teacher and friend Robert Fitzgerald, the work of AWP is a process of “enlarging the change.”

This is good news for all involved. Kudos, Judy!

At Poet’s Quarterly, Edan Mohr reviews Judith Baumel’s The Kangaroo Girl, which Mohr calls “a book of rare power and beauty, a look back what survives in memory and how time itself transforms and sustains us.”

Writes Mohr:

Judith Baumel’s latest book conveys both a playful nostalgia and a haunting regret. In navigating a course through personal history, the author offers a meditation on worlds and people lost…. Baumel examines the past with precision, following each thread and considering patterns that emerge.

Baumel’s subtle art is to pair lightness with gravity, touching on matters of mortality, faith, and history with extraordinary fluency….. [T]his highly personal book transcends the confines of a single life.

Read the full review, here.