"A Voice from the 'The Northern Capital of the Caribbean': An Interview with Moira Crone"

Abstract

Born in 1952 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Moira Crone was educated at Smith College, where she coincided with one of her mentors, V.S. Pritchett, and at Johns Hopkins University. From that moment on, until today, Crone’s literary production has primarily focused on short fiction. Some of her stories have been published in anthologies such as "New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best in 2001", 2005, 2007, "Smith Voices", or "Various Gifts: Brooklyn Fiction of the Eighties" while many stories came out in renowned magazines such as "The New Yorker", "Ploughshares", "The Southern Review", "Ohio Review", just to name a few. Her literary production has also been widely acclaimed and Moira Crone has been the recipient of prestigious awards including the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers in April 2009, or the 2004 Faulkner/Wisdom Prize for Novella for “The Ice Garden,” the opening story in her latest volume of short stories, "What Gets Into Us." In this interview, Moira Crone explores the authors and cultural elements which shaped her fiction. She also reveals an intimate view of Southern storytelling in which she acknowledges the importance of Cajun tradition in Louisiana, the region where she lives, the concept of regional literature as well as historical aspects such as racial discrimination and the ensuing Civil Rights Movement which shook the social foundations of the Southern states of the Union during the 1950s and 1960s.