Visiting Composer

Enid Bluff has begun to fall out of love with music, not only because her ideas are too often dismissed by her male classmates (and professors) in the composing program where she studies at a mid-tier university, but because the boys’-club mentality around her has made this a lonely place to be, much less create. That changes, however, with the arrival of an enigmatic young woman who turns out to be the long-lost, presumed-dead American composer Gloria Clifford, straight from Baltimore in 1910. At nineteen, Gloria is at the beginning of her musical career, but she is already ensnared in an intoxicating and confusing relationship with her much older musical mentor—and soon-to-be husband—Luther Langdon. What follows is a story about friendship, the struggle to be both a woman and an artist, and those imbalances of power which end up repeating like unfortunate refrains, time and again.

• Miami University Press Novella PrizeWinner 2024