Julie Schumacher
Keynote Speaker:
“The Serious Side of Humor”
Julie Schumacher is the author of eleven books, including the Dear Committee Members trilogy. The first novel in the trilogy was a national bestseller, receiving the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Schumacher is the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honor.
The trilogy follows Jason Fitger, an English professor at an obscure Midwestern liberal arts college known as Payne University. Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience all shine satirical light on academia and our cultural shift away from the humanities. The English Experience was named a People Magazine Book of the Week. The Washington Post called it “The perfect back-to-school novel for cynics.”
Her other books include a collection of short stories, a satirical coloring book, and five novels for younger readers. Her first published story, “Reunion,” written to fulfill an undergraduate writing assignment (“tell a family tale”) was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1983. Subsequent stories and essays were published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, MS, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and other venues.
Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
She is a Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota, where she directed the MFA program for a dozen years. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, Julie graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University.
About her keynote talk, The Serious Side of Humor, Julie said “Literature that makes us laugh can be a relief at a time when it’s hard to face the news. Comedy offers a reprieve and a welcome escape. We often think of it as entirely apart from ‘real life’ and its stresses. But humor is sneaky. Like a magician’s sleight of hand, it can distract with laughter while skewering a target or engaging in social critique.”
Schumacher will talk about the seriousness of humor and her own experience as the writer of three comic satirical novels about higher education, a field in which she has worked for thirty-some years.