Prof Megan Giddings Named McKnight Land-Grant Professor
The assistant professor receives support in writing her third novel
Assistant Professor Megan Giddings has been awarded a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for 2023-2025. Congratulations! The goal of this University of Minnesota program is to advance the careers of assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives. Giddings is one of 10 University faculty members to receive this year's award. She joined the Department of English as a Creative Writing Program professor in fall 2022.
Giddings’s first novel, Lakewood, was a Best Book of 2020 at New York Magazine and NPR and a nominee for two NAACP Image Awards. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly, garnered national and international attention with reviews in the Guardian, New York Times, Time, and Boston Globe, among others. A guest on Late Night with Seth Myers, Giddings is now working on her third novel, Meet Me at the Crossroads.
"I'm reading the following books as research," Giddings has said about that work in progress: "Freedom Dreams by Robin D. G. Kelley; a lot of pulp paperbacks from the '60s and '70s about unexplained phenomena; and library books about mediums and automatic writing and spirit art. (The latter is one of the phrases people use to say that they've made an art piece in a trance state, where they feel a spirit was working through them.)"
Congratulations to Professor Giddings!
