Victoria Redel – whose work has been anthologized, awarded, and translated into 10 languages – is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise (Four Way Books) and the novel Before Everything. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001), was adapted into a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. In Paradise, Redel rewrites Eden, interrogating the idea of utopia within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. “But doesn’t every story begin with expulsion?” she asks. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, she weaves in religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. And in examining those borders, she navigates geopolitical perimeters and the space between the living and the dead, and delineates the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and illuminates the threads that tie recent catastrophes to the demands and flight paths that made us.
