page_title: Francine Prose
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Francine Prose / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Francine Prose at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival.
context_page_description: Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center.
context_section_description: Born in Brooklyn, Prose graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991. Prose's novel The Glorious Ones has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.
  In March 2007, Prose was chosen to succeed American writer Ron Chernow beginning in April to serve a one-year term as president of PEN American Center, a New York City-based literary society of writers, editors and translators that works to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship. In March 2008, Prose ran unopposed for a second one-year term as PEN American Center president. That same month, London artist Sebastian Horsley had been denied entry into the United States and PEN president Prose subsequently invited Horsley to speak at PENs annual festival of international literature in New York at the end of April 2008. Prose was succeeded by philosopher and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah as president of PEN in April 2009.
  Prose sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award. Her novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca.
  Prose received the Rome Prize in 2006.
  In 2010, Prose received the Washington University International Humanities Medal. The medal, awarded biennially and accompanied by a cash prize of $25,000, is given to honor a person whose humanistic endeavors in scholarship, journalism, literature, or the arts have made a difference in the world. Other winners include Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2006, journalist Michael Pollan in 2008, and documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, in 2012.
caption: Prose at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival
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