Fairfield's MFA in Creative Writing Program will present a conversation between MFA professor and National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay and novelist-essayist Tara Isabella Burton on Wednesday, May 4 at 7:30 p.m.
Hosted by Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author and professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' MFA in Creative Writing program, the third and final panel discussion event in this semester’s Inspired Writers Series will feature novelist and essayist .
“Tara Isabella Burton is a brilliant writer in both fiction and nonfiction,” said Klay, “brilliantly exploring a younger generation’s struggles with faith and spirituality in new forms and sometimes shocking directions. Her newest novel is passionate, beautiful, and incredibly fun to read. I’m really looking forward to chatting with her.”
Burton is the author of the novels The World Cannot Give (Simon & Schuster, 2022) and Social Creature (Doubleday, 2018) and the nonfiction Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (Public Affairs, 2020). She is currently working on an intellectual genealogy of self-creation, Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, to be published by Public Affairs in 2023.
In Burton’s latest novel, The World Cannot Give, she has traced the forms of the 21st century search for meaning and transcendence, has written a “propulsive and passionate” coming of age story in which fevered longing, desires both sacred and profane, and darker undercurrents all become dramatically and tragically entangled.
Burton’s debut novel, Social Creature, was named a “best book of the year” by The New York Times, Vulture, and The Guardian. She has written on religion, culture, and place for The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, City Journal, The Economist’s 1843 lifestyle magazine, Aeon digital magazine, The BBC, The Atlantic, Salon, The New Statesman, and The Telegraph. She is a columnist at Religion News Service, a contributing editor at American Purpose, and the former staff religion writer at Vox. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Volume 1 Brooklyn, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, Tor, PANK, and more. She was a Clarendon Scholar and received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford, in 2017.
A companion speaker series to the MFA program, Inspired Writers Series events are designed to not only provide encouragement and inspiration for writers, but also to inform, entertain, and enlighten any participant with lively discussions from top authors. All events are free and open to the public.
For information about the Inspired Writers Series, please visit
