Patricia Klindienst Receives Heiner Fellowship; Wins American Book Award

Writer Patricia Klindienst, author of The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America, is currently in residence under the auspices of the Phillip and Eric Heiner Endowed Fellowship. Funded through the generosity of long-time supporter Frances Heiner of Lynchburg, Virginia, this residency will support a highly deserving visual artist, writer or composer each year.

The Earth Knows My Name, which tells the stories of fifteen ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens, received a 2007 American Book Award and has been praised by readers as diverse as Dr. Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez.

While in residence at the VCCA, Patricia is working on her second book, which interweaves the lives and destinies of one of the richest men in Europe in the 1890s and a penniless Russian Jew who escaped the Pale of Settlement,a western border region of Imperial Russia, and reinvented himself in America.

Patricia began her career as an interdisciplinary scholar, publishing ground-breaking feminist re-interpretations of classical myths and biblical stories.An award-winning scholar and teacher at Yale University, she left the profession, putting aside the manuscripts of two scholarly books and began to write for a broader audience.