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BORN IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA · NOTRE DAME FACULTY, 1993–2021
The tie. Valerie Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, and her tie to this city is the working life: she joined the University of Notre Dame's English faculty in 1993, held the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship from 2017, and retired emerita in June 2021. She is the founding editor of the Notre Dame Review — the journal itself stands in Arts; this entry is her books'.
The novels. Six: Due East (1987); How I Got Him Back, or Under the Cold Moon's Shine (1989); Who Do You Love (1991); The Distance Between Us (1994); Brain Fever (1996); and The Powers (Northwestern University Press, 2013). Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times Notable Books of their years. A 2002 Showtime television film, Due East, was drawn from her first two novels. When The Powers appeared in 2013, Northwestern University Press reissued the first five novels with it — a uniform edition that stands as her shelf's documented summation. The stories followed in The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories (2020). She holds a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. The town of Due East in the fiction is Beaufort, not South Bend; what belongs to this city is the second half of the career, written from the faculty office across the river.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame, Department of English — the faculty biography: the 1993 appointment, the Kenan professorship of 2017, the founding editorship of the Notre Dame Review.
- Notre Dame Magazine — the six novels in order with their years (1987–2013), the Northwestern reissue of the first five with The Powers (2013), the 2002 Showtime film, the New York Times Notable Books for Who Do You Love and Brain Fever, and The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories (2020).
- Arts (this record) — the Notre Dame Review, founded in the winter of 1995 under her founding editorship.