Fiction Writer Thisbe Nissen to Read at Her Alma Mater By Marci Janas
	Thisbe Nissen		OCTOBER 21, 1999-- Award-winning fiction writer Thisbe Nissen '94 will read from her works at 4:45 P.M. Tuesday, November 9, in King 106. The Creative Writing Program and the Alumni Association sponsor her appearance. The event is free and open to the public. This has been a very good year for Nissen. Her debut collection of short stories, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, a national competition juried by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is booked on a reading tour that includes appearances in Ann Arbor, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle. Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to Diane Vreuls, emeritus associate professor of creative writing and one of Nissen's former teachers. "Thisbe was one of the few writing students able to make literature from the daily events of her own life and her social scene while living it," Vreuls says. "She had that artist's perspective and a wry eye. She's wonderful." Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, says Nissen’s stories "abound in a rich life, holding sad, awkward, edgy contemporaneity in their generous embrace. . . . There is great originality and great freedom in Thisbe Nissen’s approach to her subject, a kind of classicism in her lucid and compassionate interest in the ways of this present world." Nissen’s subject is love, or falling in love. In her creative worlds, everyone everywhere does it, and people are as apt to fall in love with certain moments, places, and gestures as they are with one another. A native New Yorker, Nissen received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship in 1998. Her stories have appeared in Seventeen, Story, and other publications. She lives in Iowa.
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