Rebecca Makkai: 2023 Zale Kimmerling Writer in Residence

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. A 202 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.

Each year since 1985, the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence Program has brought a renowned woman-identified writer to campus. The Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence program was established by Dana Zale Gerard (NC ‘85), and made possible by an annual gift from the M.B. and Edna Zale Foundation of Dallas, Texas. Since 2006, the Program has been generously supported by Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. In 2010, the program became fully endowed through a gift from Martha McCarty Wells (NC’63), and known as the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence program.