Snowden Wright
Twitter: @SnowdenWright, Website
Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.
Wright was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the 2018 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. Recipient of the 17th Annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship from the Carson McCullers Center, he has attended writing residencies at Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Stone Court, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi, where he is at work on his third novel, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Snowden Wright’s most recent novel, American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s Discover program, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year
Artist Statement
Alice Munro once described a story as being like a house: “You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”
I build houses. By focusing on all levels of storytelling, from the architecture of narrative to the construction of sentences, I want readers to inhabit and dwell in each of my novels, regardless whether it’s a cozy shotgun cottage, a renovated brownstone, or a dizzyingly palatial estate. I consider fiction writing an aggregate of crafts. All at once, a novelist must be a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber, a painter, a roofer, and a mason. The contractor is the reader. Their interest guides and supervises my work.
The completed house, I hope, combines well-crafted dialogue, character development, point of view, syntax, tone, pacing, and evocation of place in order to convey, in Munro’s words, “a sturdy sense of itself of being built of its own necessity.” I hope it’s a house where readers want to live for a while, and I hope, too, the world outside the house is altered by being viewed from its windows.
At Tusen Takk
During his Tusen Takk residency, Snowden will work on his novels-in-progress, one a crime novel and the other currently titled Dame.
The crime novel, forthcoming from HarperCollins, follows a Black, female private investigator and her white, male partner as they attempt to solve a high-profile murder case in 1980s Mississippi.
A work of literary historical fiction, Dame investigates the cult of celebrity and matrix of female identity as refracted through the warped lens of Hollywood. It parses fact and fiction in order to understand and honor one of the most remarkable and polarizing women of the past century.
Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) was named after a waterfall in Georgia, which in turn got its name from a Choctaw word that means, in one dialect, “delightful sound,” and, in another, “terrible waters.” Those two extremes typified Bankhead’s entire life. Actress, seductress, philanthropist, libertine, and bon vivant, she tore a path from small-town Alabama to the peak of Golden Age Hollywood, stoking outrage and devotion in equal measure along the way. Dame depicts the highs and lows of Bankhead’s life and career, attempting to discover the authentic, singular identity of the starlet who, as playwright Mary Chase once noted, “is seven different women, at least.”
Snowden Wright’s debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, winner of the Engine Books Novel Prize
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