Prairie Lights invites you to join author Kathleen Renk as she reads from her newest novel, Toward Her Awakening: A Novel of Kate Chopin, and is joined in conversation by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
The following is an introduction to Toward Her Awakening, which re-imagines the life of novelist Kate Chopin:
“In 1850s' St. Louis, five-year-old Katy O'Flaherty's father sends her to a strict convent school to stifle her precocious nature. Thus begins the life of the girl who becomes a progressive, feminist, ‘new woman’ writer who shocks the world with her novel The Awakening, which Willa Cather derided as the ‘Creole Bovary.’
“Kate O'Flaherty Chopin spent her childhood in St. Louis during the Civil War, where she witnessed enslaved people sold on the courthouse steps. Raised by courageous women, including a French great-grandmother who ran trading boats on the Mississippi and who believed in justice for all, it's no surprise that Kate grew into a woman who rode bareback, smoked cigarettes, dressed audaciously, and wrote about taboo topics. In other words, she defied every expectation for women in the middle-late Victorian period. Experience the vibrant and colorful world along the Mississippi and the unique Louisiana 1800s culture that permeates Chopin's writings and her approach to life." (kathleenrenk.com)
Kathleen Renk taught at the university and college level for 30 years and most recently was a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, where she spent 14 years teaching British, postcolonial, Irish, and Women’s literature. Her first historical fiction novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley (Cuidono Press) won the 2021 Story Circle Network’s May Sarton Award in Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the CIBA Goethe Award in Historical Fiction. It was also long listed for the Chautauqua Prize.
Mary Helen Stefaniak is the author of a collection of short fiction and four novels, including her recently completed novel for young readers called Slick Is Acting Weird. Her first book of nonfiction, The Six-Minute Memoir: Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2022. Mary Helen is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and professor emerita of creative writing at Creighton University.