Former Yaddo President Curtis Harnack Receives Iowa Author Award

Curtis Harnack

New York, NY (October 1, 2004) - Former Yaddo President Curtis Harnack was one of three authors honored at the Fifth Annual Iowa Author Awards Dinner on Thursday, October 7, in Des Moines. The Des Moines Public Library Foundation hosted the event.

Born in Le Mars, Iowa, Mr. Harnack is the author of three novels on life in rural, small-town Iowa: The Work of an Ancient Hand, Love and Be Silent, and Limits of the Land. His titles We Have All Gone Away and The Attic: A Memoir are widely acclaimed non-fiction accounts of his Iowa childhood. He also is the author of Under My Wings Everything Prospers, a collection of six short stories and a novella, and two nonfiction works – Persian Lions, Persian Lambs, a description of the year he spent teaching in Tabriz, Iran, as a Fulbright professor of American Literature, and Gentlemen on the Prairie, which relates the history of a colony of wealthy British settlers who attempted to recreate Victorian England on the Midwestern prairie.

Mr. Harnack graduated from and was also an English instructor at Grinnell College and received his M.A. from Columbia. He was also an instructor and visiting lecturer with the Iowa Writers Workshop in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was on the literature faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, where he co-founded the American Studies program. He served as president of the School of American Ballet and in 1979 toured Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania under the auspices of the U.S. State Department to lecture on American literature. He has lived for periods in England, France, Italy, and Iran. He traveled to China in 1986 on a U.S./China Arts Exchange program.

In 1971, Mr. Harnack was appointed president of Yaddo, succeeding the venerable Elizabeth Ames, who had welcomed Yaddo’s first artist guests in 1926 and remained in the position for nearly 50 years. However, Mr. Harnack was well acquainted with Yaddo before assuming the presidency, having been a Yaddo guest artist seven times between 1957 and 1970. Mr. Harnack retired from Yaddo in 1987 and now lives in New York City and upstate New York with his wife, fellow Yaddo writer Hortense Calisher.