Williams College Alumni Engagement and Trinity College Alumni Engagement invite you to join 2025 National Book Award Finalist and Trinity Professor
Ethan Rutherford (Williams Class of 2002) and Williams Professor Emeritus
Jim Shepard (Trinity Class of 1978) for a virtual discussion of their writing, each other's works, and their creative journeys.
Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in
BOMB,
Tin House,
Electric Literature,
Ploughshares,
One Story,
American Short Fiction,
Conjunctions, and
The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—
Farthest South and
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. His first novel,
North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, was published by A Strange Object / Deep Vellum in March 2025. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, named a “Best Book of 2025” by
Vanity Fair, the
Globe & Mail,
Lit Hub, and President Barack Obama. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches creative writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford with his wife and two children.
Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including
The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, The Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, as well as six story collections, including
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner, and the forthcoming
The Queen of Bad Influences. He’s now had nine of his stories chosen for the
Best American Short Stories, two for the
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three for Pushcart Prizes. He’s been a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the ALEX Award for Fiction, the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For seven years he was a columnist on film for the magazine
The Believer, and his film essays have been collected in
The Tunnel at the End of the Light. He’s also written screenplays for two films made from his fiction,
And Then I Go (2017) and
The World to Come (2020). He lives in Williamstown with his wife, Karen Shepard, and a pitty and a beagle, and from 1983 to 2024 taught film and creative writing at Williams College.
On the Log is a year-long initiative that invites the entire Williams College community to play with themes and ideas that explore the mythos of the log: face-to-face conversation, the power of place, and the enduring impact of direct and sustained interaction in every facet of a Williams education.