I Am You: Victoria Redel in conversation with Kimberly King Parsons

Victoria Redel has written four books of poetry, most recently Paradise; her last novel, Before Everything, was published in 2017. Her short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O,and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

National Book Award-nominee Kimberly King Parsons is the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on TIME Magazine's Best Books of 2024. The New York Times praised this debut novel as "a profound, gutsy tale of grief's dismantling power" and it was a best book of 2024 in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK and many others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award. An Oregon Book Award-winner, Parsons teaches fiction at Pacific University and lives in Portland with her family.