The winner of Louisiana’s 2005 Governor’s Award for Professional Artist of the Year, Olympia Vernon has taught creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Olympia currently is the Hallie Brown Ford Chair of Creative Writing at Willamette University.
Olympia Vernon has a degree in criminal justice and an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is a young blazing new talent in American literary arts and a unique offering in the speaking market.
Olympia Vernon opens for her audiences doors that lead, not only into the inner processes of productive creativity (she was so seized by the characters of her first book, Eden, that she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, or even take a shower), but also doors into the world—into your own experience, your surroundings, your relationships with the people around you. To see your world anew through your own transfigured eyes, this is her gift as a teacher. That’s what she does for her readers, too, only her books, of course, are fiction—they open into the world, the inner experience, the social and physical reality of her characters.
Inevitably, Olympia’s work has been compared to that of Toni Morrison and Maya Anjelou, but she has a truly unique voice. Her prose is lyrical and full of imagery so intensely imaginative that it stretches meaning to the point of exploding her incredible characters into gushes of color. Tortured in their inner lives and in their physical lives, these people are vividly drawn and unforgettable. Here is an artist whose creative wellspring delivers elixirs full of magic, mystery and unparalleled mastery of language.
Eden is full of this magic. In its introduction, Reynolds Price wrote, “Olympia Vernon’s fiction has the startling freshness of a sudden razor cut to the throat.†It tells the story of 14-year-old Maddy Dangerfield as she comes of age spending weekends with her Aunt Pip, who is dying of breast cancer. It takes place in Mississippi, in the same Deep South that gave birth to Vernon herself, who grew up fourth of seven children in a small town on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Its story is driven by curses and spells and the power of Southern magic. “The novel is blood red, the country setting virulently green,†wrote The New York Times Book Review. And the talent of its author, “as green and growing as those country fields where her ghosts lurk.†Eden was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the 2004 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Logic. “David Harris was loading his pistol when the sun began to burn.†So begins Logic, the story of another adolescent by the name of Logic struggling to emerge in the heat and violence of rural Mississippi. Logic Harris’s afflictions are brain damage from a fall and her incestuous father David, and the brilliantly erratic firing of her neurons colors the style of the narrative; and Logic takes us with her into an alternative reality that she creates to cope. If anything, Vernon’s imagination in Logic is even more startling, alchemical and authoritative than it was in Eden. Logic was nominated for the 2005 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
A Killing in this Town. Her third novel is a dedication to those lynched and murdered in Mississippi. A young Southern white boy must drag a black man to his death upon his coming of age in a world dominated by the Ku Klux Klan. But a man haunted by past sins returns to town and the two find a way to defy tradition, stand up to the demons of history and transcend the fragile hierarchy of a society poisoned by hatred. A Killing in this Town is a taut poetic masterpiece that shows the power of an individual to stand up to the demons of history and bring the cycle of violence to an end.
