There are a thousand ways to get to know fellow authors, including workshops and conferences and friends in common and yes, Twitter or Facebook or whatever social network is hot at the moment. And MFA programs, for those who choose to go the route of getting that (usually expensive) degree, offer another set of possibilities. I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths not just with the writers I met in the MFA program at American University, but others who attended that program at different times. It’s an exciting and varied list of accomplished alumni, including today’s guest.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of the novel Silver Girl, released in 2018 by Unnamed Press, and called “profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing” in a Publishers Weekly starred review. Her collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the 16 best story collections of the year, Her previous novels are Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Short fiction and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Iowa Review, Washingtonian, The Collagist, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Salon, Washingtonian, Washington Post Magazine, and many others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and in 2020, her story “Stay There” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Pietrzyk is a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program and often teaches in the MA Program in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Raised in Iowa, she now lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Leslie’s recommendation for #read99women is an intriguing and challenging novel, and here’s what she says about it:

“WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver is probably my favorite book to recommend...to the right person! It's dark and intense, a nail-bitingly compulsive read, about a woman whose son commits a Columbine-type school massacre (which the reader discovers right away; no spoilers here!). Eva is conflicted about her son: Does she love him enough, or at all? Is it her fault the boy is so challenging to love? Can he sense her ambiguity? What does it mean that his father is able to love Kevin deeply and without reservation? These tough questions circle and tighten until suddenly it's four in the morning and you're not sleeping until you finish the book. (P.S. The movie doesn't do justice. You must witness Eva's voice for yourself through the letters she writes in this epistolary novel.)”