Last year, The Paris Review joined forces with the Bard Prison Initiative, which for twenty-five years has provided a full-time, tuition-free, degree-granting liberal arts education to students in unconventional settings, including several Upstate New York prisons and BPI’s microcolleges in New York City, one of which is in a Brooklyn Public Library. In March, we announced the Paris Review Visiting Professorship—a position for a creative writer to teach the literature that has inspired them to BPI students—and were heartened to receive a great number of nominations from the community. We are now delighted to announce that the inaugural Paris Review Visiting Professor is Javier Fuentes, who will be teaching three semester-long courses at NYSDOC Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York.
Fuentes, who was born in Madrid, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel about an undocumented pastry chef who is forced to leave New York and start life over in Spain—and his love affair with a young man named Jacobo, whom he meets on the plane. Fuentes’s first course, called “Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature,” will explore the way time and place structure narrative; his syllabus includes Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Also Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—“Not a book that you usually think of in terms of space,” Fuentes said. “But if you read it closely, the house that Gregor finds himself in and the objects around him really are the main characters.” Class starts on September 5 and will meet twice a week. We want to congratulate Javi, and to wish the best of luck to him and his students as they embark on the new semester!
