From the November 2011 Close to Home e-newsletter
Lynn Z. Bloom, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Martin Bloom, Professor Emeritus of Social Work, are establishing the Bloom Endowment for the Mark Twain Distinguished Author-in-Residence with a planned gift through the UConn Foundation.
The endowment for the Mark Twain Distinguished Author-in-Residence, housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences where Lynn Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, will ensure UConn’s commitment to Twain’s heritage, through bringing creative writers and scholars of American literature not only to the Storrs campus but to the state of Connecticut.
An iconoclastic, boundary-breaking writer in the Twain mold, Bloom was hired as the inaugural Aetna Chair of Writing at UConn in 1988, the first chair in the nation to be endowed for writing, the first endowed chair on UConn’s flagship campus–of further groundbreaking significance because it went to a woman. Just as Twain is associated with Hartford and Connecticut, Bloom’s name is associated with writers and writing teachers throughout the state as a consequence of this appointment. The Aetna chair’s mandate, under Bloom’s direction, is to focus on the teaching of writing at the Storrs and regional campuses through a host of events and initiatives.
These include teacher fellowships to the Connecticut Writing Project Summer Institute–over 450 to date; co-sponsorship of annual conferences at UConn on teaching writing and two national composition research conferences; and a creative writer-in-residence every semester. The chair also supports publication of Essay CONNections –volumes of award-winning freshman essays; and UConn’s award-winning student literary magazine, The Long River Review; teaching awards, the annual Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction; and prizes for freshman and graduate critical essays, creative nonfiction–and interdisciplinary writing through the UConn Writing Center and activities of UConn’s renowned Litchfield County Writers Project.
"I have liked being able to play good fairy with the money from the Aetna endowment," she says. "And now I have the opportunity to become a philanthropist myself."
To support the Bloom Endowment for the Mark Twain Distinguished Author-in-Residence, please contact the Foundation's development department.
