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my dark vanessa

Kate Elizabeth Russell

Kate Elizabeth Russell (born 1984) is an American author. Her debut novel, My Dark Vanessa, was published in 2020 and became a national bestseller.

Russell was raised in the town of Clifton, Maine, attending John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine,and Brewer High School in Brewer,Maine, from which she graduated in 2002. She subsequently studied as an undergraduate at the University of Maine at Farmington, earning a B.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2006, and went on to earn an M.F.A. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas.

Russell's first novel offers a fictional account of a traumatic sexual relationship between its protagonist, Vanessa Wye, and Jacob Strane. Wye is 15 years old and a lonely student at boarding school when Strane, her 42-year-old English teacher, begins grooming her for a sexual relationship which will come to cast an appalling shadow over her life. The novel is a first-person narrative, jumping forward and backward in time amongst 2000, 2007, and 2017, with this last year affording Russell the social context of the Me Too movement.

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