Name Carole Maso Role Novelist | Education Vassar College | |
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Awards Lannan Literary Award for Fiction Nominations Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Biography/Autobiography Books The art lover, Break every rule, The American woman in, The Room Lit by Roses: A, Beauty is convulsive | ||
Fellow Spotlight: Carole Maso
Carole Maso is a contemporary American novelist and essayist, known for her experimental, poetic and fragmentary narratives often called postmodern. She received a B.A. in English from Vassar College in 1977. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, an NEA fellowship, and several other grants. Her first published novel was Ghost Dance, which appeared in 1986. Her best known novel is probably Defiance, published in 1998. She is a professor of literary arts at Brown University, where she has taught since 1995, and has previously held positions as a writer-in-residence at Illinois State University in 1991–92 and George Washington University in 1992–93, as well as teaching writing at Columbia University in 1993. A forthcoming novel, The Bay of Angels, incorporates various narrative types—essay, memoir, prose poems, and even graphics—and represents nearly 15 years of work. Parts of The Bay of Angels have appeared in journals and anthologies.
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Maso was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1955, the child of her jazz musician father and her emergency room nurse mother.
Maso admits she was not an avid reader in childhood. Indeed, she did not write creatively until her senior year at Vassar, when she submitted about 50 pages of prose poems as her senior honors thesis. It is at this point that she knew she wanted to be a writer.
Maso eschewed the traditional path to teaching, having never studied formally beyond her Vassar B.A., despite having been offered a graduate fellowship at Boston University. Rather, she devoted 9 years to learning the craft by doing, writing while alternately working as a waitress, artist's model, and fencing instructor. She also did some house- and cat-sitting, which afforded her time to write. Maso has referred to this period as her "apprenticeship years."