Classes — Daphne Kalotay

A citizen of both Canada and the U.S., Daphne Kalotay grew up in New Jersey and spent her summers in Ontario. She graduated from Vassar College before moving to Massachusetts to attend Boston University’s Creative Writing Program. There, her stories went on to win the school’s Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation. She remained at BU to complete a PhD in Modern & Contemporary Literature and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the works of Mavis Gallant. (Her interviews with Mavis Gallant can be read in The Paris Review‘s Writers-At-Work series.)

Daphne has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her fiction collection, Calamity and Other Stories, was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize, and her debut novel, the national and international bestseller Russian Winter, won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize, made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and has been published in over twenty foreign editions.

Daphne’s second novel, Sight Reading, was a Boston Globe bestseller, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize and winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. Her most recent novel, Blue Hours, wass a 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read.” Her new fiction collection, The Archivists, won the Grace Paley Prize, is long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and includes the One City One Story Boston selection “Relativity.”

Daphne lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she is a Special Program Instructor in the Masters in Creative Writing and Literature Program at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education.

Teaching & Public Speaking

Daphne is a dedicated teacher of writing and literature. She has taught in undergraduate and MFA programs at Boston University, Emerson College, University of Massachusetts-Boston and Western New England University (low-residency), and at Princeton University from 2017-2023. A former Writer-in-Residence at Skidmore College and Lynchburg College, her work with adults and post-MFA students includes courses at Grub Street, Inc. and Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, where she currently teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature Master’s Degree Program. She also enjoys public speaking and has given talks on the research and writing process at numerous public libraries and academic institutions. Click here for her teaching c.v.