Tillman Extolled by American Academy for Fiction and Writing Mastery

ALBANY, N.Y. (March 22, 2022) — Novelist, short story writer, cultural critic and UAlbany Professor of English Lynne Tillman has turned out to be every bit the success her youthful self envisioned.

“When I was 8, I decided to be a writer,” said Tillman, named last week the winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Katherine Anne Porter Award. “That was it — I would be a writer, even a great one, I thought, which still astonishes me. Whatever else I did, my focus was always on writing. There were obstacles I had to overcome, but if there is such a thing as a calling, writing was mine, is mine.”

Tillman, who arrived at UAlbany in January 2002, received the Porter award for her achievements both in fiction and nonfiction. All are filled with distinctly different protagonists and literary styles. “I try to tell stories in different ways, because I believe forms influence meaning, and different approaches allow for other ways of thinking,” she said. “Stories are ways of thinking, I believe.

Before coming to UAlbany in the fall of 2003, Associate Professor and Chair of English Eric Keenaghan says he knew of Lynne Tillman “as a teller of a different kind of story, her Madame Realism stories.” He described them as “moving between cultural theory, art criticism and fiction.”

He said that most of her UAlbany colleagues and students “know her best as a well-established fiction writer, the author of such revered novels as Haunted Houses and American Genius, A Comedy and, most recently, Men and Apparitions. Those fictions and her many others have earned her a great deal of recognition and honors, such as her Guggenheim in 2006, an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and now the Katherine Anne Porter Award.”

Tillman’s second collection of essays, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Reading such collections, said Keenaghan, “gives you a front row seat to both her masterful care as a writer and her great humor.”

Other nonfiction achievements have been The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967 (1999) and the book The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural and social history of a literary landmark where writers and artists congregated for two decades.

The Porter award carries with it a $20,000 prize and will be presented at the 124-year-old Academy’s annual ceremonial in May. A committee of notable authors chose 16 separate winners in various literary categories. Recent recipients of the Porter award have included Kathryn Davis, Sherman Alexie, Tim O'Brien, John Edgar Wideman and Maureen Howard.

While acknowledging Tillman’s great literary gifts, Keenaghan has come to prize Tillman most as an exemplar and colleague. “Our University now puts a premium on interdisciplinary work, and Lynne's career has long exemplified what a strong critical and creative marriage of different disciplines looks like.”

Praising her creative writing workshops and supervision of PhD dissertation and MA theses, he noted that Tillman possesses “a sensitivity to the difficult craft of writing an excellent sentence while telling an engaging story. She is exceedingly generous with young writers and artists, helping them find their voices while they launch and develop their careers.”

Her care and encouragement may be due to Tillman’s understanding of the arduous internal and external challenges a writer faces to achieve acceptance. “The drive to write is complicated by all kinds of conscious and unconscious feelings,” she said.

“I do love to write, feel happiest when I'm writing and sense that it's going well — that can feel like mentally flying — but once your writing leaves your embrace, it's fair game,” Tillman said. “Anyone can shoot it down. Needing approval or recognition can feel awful. A writer has to have a lot of faith in herself to continue.”

Keenaghan finds that Tillman brings a human and personal element into every interaction. “She champions underdogs. On the page and in conversation, she continues to witness and honor the memory of friends who died in the early years of the AIDs epidemic, including critic Craig Owens, visual artist and author David Wojnarowicz, writer Cookie Mueller and many others.

“I would like to think that the Katherine Anne Porter Award recognizes Professor Tillman for not just being a fabulous storyteller but also for having built several communities throughout her storied life and career.”