On Thursday, Feb. 8, the entire junior class met in Tomasso Hall for a reveal of the 2024-2025 Baird English Symposium author. Next year’s Symposium teacher Cameron Biondi was excited to share that novelist and short story writer Karen Russell will be the subject of the Symposium class during the upcoming fall semester.
In this unique and immersive course, seniors who have applied to be in the course read every piece by an author, who visits Kingswood Oxford in January and speaks to the entire school.
In the Form 5 Meeting, Mr. Biondi first reviewed the Symposium program as well as what it means for students and for the school, highlighting some recent visiting authors. To make the reveal more suspenseful, engaging, and anticipatory, Mr. Biondi explained some of the premises of Ms. Russell’s work. These blurbs were cryptic and brief, with examples like “Two aging vampires make a life for themselves in Italy, hoping that their new diet of lemons will stave off their hunger,” and “Several silk factory workers, having been partially transformed into silkworms, plan a revolt against their overseers.”
After finally unmasking Ms. Russell as the author of these fantastical and creative plot bases, students learned more about her educational background. After graduating from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Spanish, Ms. Russell pursued a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University.
With next year’s Symposium class, Mr. Biondi wanted to switch up the types of works students read. “We’ve had authors of fiction for the last bunch of years, but mostly realistic fiction, very grounded in a certain place or a certain experience in the author’s life,” he said. “Karen Russell takes a different approach where there’s outlandish magical realism, humor, horror, fantasy, and it’s all mixed together across the breadth of her stories.”
This great variety of content and concepts will open students’ eyes to deeper meaning and allow them to form connections with a character or experience. “There’s kind of a lot of ways that you can grab onto her stories, even though the hook of the premise is what people focus on at first,” Mr. Biondi said. “There’s a lot to dive into.”
Junior Sophie Chen is looking forward to applying, as she finds both the Symposium class and Russell’s work to be unique and intriguing. “I like the medium,” she said. “You can do a lot with short stories. I think there will be a lot of discussions about what her fantasy is standing in for in the real world.”
English teacher Heidi Hojnicki has taught Symposium twice during her time at KO, teaching authors Bharati Mukherjee in 2007 and Colson Whitehead in 2018. She shared the benefits of the class. “Taking the class is such a unique experience,” she said. “It’s challenging, there is a lot of reading, and the level of discussion is pretty high, but that in itself is a really exciting opportunity because you’re challenged by brilliant peers.”
Not only does the Symposium course encourage thoughtful interaction between students in the class and the author’s work, but every English class at KO reads some part of each author’s repertoire. “In terms of the whole school, we’ve gotten a little taste of it with some of the kids who have read ‘St. Lucy’s [Home for Girls Raised by Wolves]’,” Mr. Biondi said of a unit for underclassmen in recent years. “It’s generated a lot of lively discussion.”
Overall, KO anticipates Karen Russell’s visit to campus next winter, and the excitement of another remarkable year of the Symposium program. “I’m so excited for Mr. Biondi,” Ms. Hojnicki said. “He’s an amazing colleague, he’s an incredible teacher, and he’s going to have so much fun with this.”
