Valerie Sayers
Beaufort’s own Valerie Sayers, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Notre Dame, has won numerous awards, including a National Endowment of the Arts literature fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes for Fiction. Compared to many Southern writers including Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy, a review in Publishers Weekly broadens her literary tradition: “In her first novel since 1996, Sayers (Brain Fever) captures the momentous 1941 baseball season with enough nuanced acumen and sophistication to lift her novel close to those of Malamud and Kinsella.”
Sayers’s hometown, the setting for her first novel Due East drew praise from Publishers Weekly. “...a sleepy seaside town is so beautifully caught that by the tender conclusion the reader has been transported into an unfamiliar but truthfully rendered world. It's a novel that's much more than merely promising: it marks the arrival of a true writer.”
Sayers aspired to be a brain surgeon, “...and so until college, I wrote a great deal of very short material because that fire kept dwindling down.” However, she realized that hard work was needed and “becoming a writer was in its own way sort of like becoming a brain surgeon.”
Stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Her short story "The Other Woman" is published in Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women's Fiction (1997).
Praise continued through the publications of her novels, Washington Post stated: “Valerie Sayers’s idiosyncratic and brilliantly realized new novel, The Powers, opens in the summer of 1941, when Europe is swept up in war and the United States is swept up in baseball mania fueled by the hitting streak of the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio.
In the on-line journal, Image, Sayers notes: “The novel explores private and public acts of witness as Americans confronted the plight of European Jews. In both realistic and fantastic chapters, it grapples with heroism and public heroes (Joe DiMaggio, Superman, Dorothy Day, Walker Evans); Catholic anti-Semitism; pacifism; photography––and, of course, baseball.
In addition to her six novels, Sayers is the author of a collection of stories, The Age of Infidelity (2020). She arrived at Notre Dame in 1993, was named the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English in 2017, and retired as Professor Emerita in June 2021. Educated at Fordham and Columbia, her work explores Southern Irish Catholics, the forces of segregation and other public issues.
-- Libby Bernardin
Sayers’s hometown, the setting for her first novel Due East drew praise from Publishers Weekly. “...a sleepy seaside town is so beautifully caught that by the tender conclusion the reader has been transported into an unfamiliar but truthfully rendered world. It's a novel that's much more than merely promising: it marks the arrival of a true writer.”
Sayers aspired to be a brain surgeon, “...and so until college, I wrote a great deal of very short material because that fire kept dwindling down.” However, she realized that hard work was needed and “becoming a writer was in its own way sort of like becoming a brain surgeon.”
Stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Her short story "The Other Woman" is published in Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women's Fiction (1997).
Praise continued through the publications of her novels, Washington Post stated: “Valerie Sayers’s idiosyncratic and brilliantly realized new novel, The Powers, opens in the summer of 1941, when Europe is swept up in war and the United States is swept up in baseball mania fueled by the hitting streak of the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio.
In the on-line journal, Image, Sayers notes: “The novel explores private and public acts of witness as Americans confronted the plight of European Jews. In both realistic and fantastic chapters, it grapples with heroism and public heroes (Joe DiMaggio, Superman, Dorothy Day, Walker Evans); Catholic anti-Semitism; pacifism; photography––and, of course, baseball.
In addition to her six novels, Sayers is the author of a collection of stories, The Age of Infidelity (2020). She arrived at Notre Dame in 1993, was named the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English in 2017, and retired as Professor Emerita in June 2021. Educated at Fordham and Columbia, her work explores Southern Irish Catholics, the forces of segregation and other public issues.
-- Libby Bernardin
