National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis to visit Salve Regina

American novelist and short story writer Bob Shacochis, winner of the National Book Award, will visit Salve Regina Friday, Sept. 20 to discuss and read from his latest novel, “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul,” which has been receiving critical acclaim. The presentation will be held at 6 p.m. in the Bazarsky Lecture Hall.

Shacochis’s talk will help the Department of English celebrate the launch of its new minor in creative writing, coordinated by writer-in-residence and assistant professor Jen McClanaghan.

Renowned for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti with “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage and vengeance. In gripping prose, he builds a complex and disturbing story about America’s coming of age in a pre-9/11 world. The Washington Post called the work “a spy novel the way Moby Dick is a fishing tale.”

Shacochis’s first collection of stories, “Easy In the Islands,” won the National Book Award for first fiction, and his second collection, “The Next New World,” was awarded the Prix de Rome from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the author of the novel, “Swimming in the Volcano,” a finalist for the National Book Award, and “The Immaculate Invasion,” a work of literary reportage that was a finalist for The New Yorker Literary Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Shacochis is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, and his op-eds on the U.S. military, Haiti and Florida politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.