Dear Committee Members, here is Julie Schumacher.

Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome to the third writer on our Signed, Sealed, Delivered panel about letter writing. There is of course a long and rich history of novels consisting entirely of letters, but few are as mordantly hilarious as Julie Schumacher’s brilliant book, Dear Committee Members. (As someone wrote, it puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary.")

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. It’s completely wonderful.

Julie will also be appearing on a second panel about writing comedy - for obvious reasons.

Julie Schumacher is the author of Dear Committee Members, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, as well as nine other books, including The Shakespeare Requirement. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and in The Best American Short Stories and O.Henry Awards anthologies.  Schumacher is a Regents Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota, where she directed the MFA program for a dozen years. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.