Academic writing and literary fiction writing are two completely different missions. Academic writing is meticulous and requires clarity and precision rather than lyricism, illusion, and metaphor. Yet the three novelists on this panel are all Lehigh academics who write fiction. They discuss the challenges and opportunities of dancing in two different ballrooms.
When Norrin M. Ripsman isn’t writing fiction, he is a professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. Born in Canada, he has lived in eleven cities in six countries on three continents. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and has made suburban Philadelphia his home since 2016. He has published two novels—Bullet Holes and The Oracle of Spring Garden Road--and a collection of fourteen short stories, Song Book. He is currently working on his sixth novel.
Laura Katz Olson is AGF Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. To date, she has published nine nonfiction books on the U.S. health system and long-term care politics and policy. Elder Care Journey, which relates her personal experiences as a caregiver for her mother, won a Gold Medal in the 2017 Living Now Book award competition. Olson has served on the American Political Science Council and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Critical Political Science. In 2009, she received the Charles A. McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ruth Knafo Setton was born in Morocco, a few hours from the Djma el Fna’a, the fabled square of Marrakech, where every night for the past thousand years, the storyteller weaves a web of magic around his audience. Setton must have absorbed the imaginative power of story because when she received her first diary, the first words she wrote were: “I want to be a writer.” Years later, she studied magic with some of the world’s greatest magicians and wondered if she could recreate the sense of wonder they created with a pen instead of a wand. It was inevitable that the protagonist of her first mystery novel, The Zigzag Girl, is a female magician who turns sleuth to solve her friend’s murder as well as the mystery of her own origins. She has also taught creative writing at Lehigh University.
