A new fiction piece entitled “Annunciation” by Lauren Groff (CRF 2021) was published online on February 7th, and will also appear in the February 14th & 21, 2022 issue of the New Yorker. In an accompanying interview, Groff mentions Civitella as critical to the story– click here to read “Annunciation” or to listen to Groff’s reading of it, and click here to read the interview.

“I also have to say that I couldn’t have written this story if there hadn’t been a tiny window, in May and June of 2021, when it seemed that the pandemic was letting up, and if, during that time, the unimaginable gift of a stay at Civitella Ranieri, a residency program in Umbria for international artists, hadn’t fallen on my head, all roses and sunshine and ceramic rooster pitchers of wine. It felt like waking up to morning light after an extended nightmare. I ran a lot in those Umbrian hills, which reminded me of running in the hills of Northern California. It was there that my friend the brilliant poet Kaveh Akbar said in passing the line about grace that I paraphrase at the end of this story, which he kindly gave permission to do. Through that line he gave the story the structure that I’d been trying to find all along.”

Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore.