Lorraine M. López’s Postcards from the Gerund State deals with a culturally diverse group of women faculty who struggle to get along with each other and with their less-than-elite school. López’s humorous but loving portrait of these women’s struggles brings an important perspective to our nation’s conflicting expectations of education and the faculty who deliver it.
Postcards follows these faculty members, mostly in the visual and literary arts, as they adjust to the hilarious surprises of life at Birnbrau, a fictional women’s college in Georgia with its own characteristic dysfunctions. In the culminating novella that concludes the collection, the group attend a residency at a Wyoming artist colony where for a full month, they cannot avoid or escape each other, as much as they might wish for it. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “an empathetic, often savagely comic portrait of the struggles of working women in what might be deemed an elite profession.” “Lorraine López has done it again. With singular wit and humor, she has gifted us with stories that probe the meaning of art and the realities of being an artist, a woman, and a caregiver,” writes Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed. Kevin Wilson, author of Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, writes, “because Lopez is so masterful, she ties that humor to deeply complex characters, a unique community, their relationships so wonderfully examined.” López teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her previous BkMk book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is also the author of Soy La Avon Lady and Call Me Henri from Curbstone Press, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters and The Realm of Hungry Spirits from Grand Central, and The Darling from University of Arizona Press.