The Hermitage Artist Retreat announces a new December program. This newly announced event, “The Fantasy of Reality,” is scheduled for Thursday, December 18th at 6pm, at Bookstore1 in downtown Sarasota. “The Fantasy of Reality” features award-winning Hermitage Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas, who straddles form, from memoir and nonfiction to fiction and poetry. Thomas is celebrated for his distinctive style that often pushes expectations, and his work often plays with the boundaries between fantasy and reality. His memoir Sink was hailed as “extraordinary” by The New York Times. Past Hermitage Fellow and National Book Award winner Justin Torres said Thomas’ novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer “reads like direct communication from the soul.” Thomas’ Hermitage Residency is generously sponsored by Georgia Court.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of several published books, including Sink, a memoir, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. Thomas’ prose and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Verge, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, TheMassachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. A graduate of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College as well as low residency MFA programs at Holy Family and Randolph Colleges, Thomas teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
All Hermitage programs are free and open to the public (with a $5/person registration fee), offering Gulf Coast audiences a rare chance to engage and interact with some of the world’s leading talent. Due to capacity limitations, registration is required at HermitageArtistRetreat.org.