(Zoref, Carol) Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City. Her novel, Barren Island (New Issues Poetry & Prose) was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction, and won the AWP Award for the Novel. Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. Barren Island is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.
