Assistant Professor Lydi Conklin Releases Novel, Songs of No Provenance, with Catapult
Creative Writing Assistant Professor Lydi Conklin has released their debut novel, Songs of No Provenance. Grab a copy at your local bookstore today or visit the Vanderbilt Bookstore!
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They have received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, four Pushcart Prizes, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was published in June 2022 by Catapult in the US and Scribner in the UK.
More information about this release can be found here.
