Class of 1978

Donna Gordon writes: “My novel What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is due out from Regal House in June 2022. While at Brown, I received the Kim Ann Arstark Award in creative writing. Afterwards, I was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford. I’ve since published several short stories and have received literary awards. I was a PEN Discovery in New England and a Ploughshares Discovery over the years. BAM published my photo essay about my documentary photography project, “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable,” in October 1989. At the time, I had been interviewing and photographing former prisoners of conscience from all over the world. My novel was inspired by that experience. I was grateful to be able to translate so much of what I learned about oppression, torture, and imprisonment into my fictional story. The essay and photos from that project were shown at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, Boston’s French Library, and Tufts. Part of my story is that it took me until the age of 64 (65 when my book comes out) to publish my first novel. Life has taken me in many directions since graduating from Brown, but my days studying creative writing with Michael Harper, Jack Hawkes, and Edwin Honig were the beginnings of something that has never lost its hold. There was a power to the experience of being in those classrooms. There was a power to exploring the special collections at the John Hay Library, where I often went just to sit and be in that space where rare books were kept.”