Photograph by Lou Rouse.

We are delighted to announce that Adelle Waldman is the 2026–2027 Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

BPI has provided a full-time, tuition-free liberal arts education to students incarcerated at several upstate New York prisons since 1999, and currently enrolls more than four hundred students across seven campuses; it also offers tuition-free degree programs through the Bard Microcolleges, hosted at local institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2024, The Paris Review and BPI announced a partnership, through which a distinguished creative writer would teach the literature that has most inspired them to BPI’s students. Waldman succeeds Javier Fuentes, and will teach three semester-long courses over the next year.

Waldman’s 2013 novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which updates the comedy of manners for the modern age, was widely celebrated for its wry commentary on the mores of contemporary Brooklyn. In 2018, Waldman moved to upstate New York and began working part-time at Target, where she unloaded trucks at 4 A.M.; the experience inspired her second novel, Help Wanted, a polyphonic work told through the perspectives of several employees at a big-box store.

Waldman’s first course focuses on Jane Austen—an author whose unsparing wit and keen social observations are a model for Waldman’s own, and whose characters cannot help but provide endless fodder for speculation, even gossip. “Society has changed so much, yet we still feel as if we know these people,” Waldman says. “The Austen scholar and the first-time reader are both equally qualified to form a considered opinion as to, say, how much we should forgive Emma for her mistakes, or which of the Dashwood sisters Austen favors in Sense and Sensibility.” Classes began in September.