We are saddened to note that Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Winners Tiffany Briere (’13) and Trudy Dittmar (’00) passed away in 2024. The Foundation sends its deepest sympathies to their families and friends.
Tiffany Briere received her RJF Writer’s Award as a young emerging writer having already begun a career in the sciences. She received her Ph.D. in genetics from Yale, where she was a researcher and teaching assistant before she turned her attention to writing. She went on to receive her M.F.A. from Bennington College. At the time of her 2013 Writer’s Award she was working on a novel and a collection of essays. Her work appeared in Tin House, The Cut, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Essays 2015 among others. She also received a Pushcart Prize for her writing. Tiffany wrote in her statement to the Foundation, “A first-generation American, I’m interested in the relationship between the individual and her community, between independence and familial obligation. I long to revisit Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, to sit down to meals – to oxtail and steamed fish, to lamb curry and dhal puri – with the matriarchs and patriarchs of my family, to sit, once again, at a table amidst their lilting accents and native patois. To visit them is to visit the countries, the back home, of my parent’s stories – my mother’s Jamaica and my father’s Guyana. There in the homes of my relatives – in their kitchens and dining rooms, closets and attics – are my connections to the past. As I’ve contemplated the experiences that have shaped me as an individual, I’ve discovered that my understanding of this world is the product of a multitude of connected narratives, of many co-existing truths.” Tiffany lived in San Diego, California, with her husband and daughter. She died of cancer in October 2024.
Trudy Dittmar was the author of the essay collection Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky: Brushes with Nature’s Wisdom (Sightline Books, University of Iowa Press, 2003). In addition to her 2000 RJF Writer’s Award she also received a 2003 Whiting Writer’s Award. Her work appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, The Georgia Review, and Orion. Her RJF nominator said of her work: “Dittmar writes about natural science and ecology in a deeply passionate personal way, and with a unique feminine consciousness that is rarely seen in work about science. What makes her essays great is their quirky voice, their ecstatic imagery, their perfect construction and personal intensity – her ability to call forth the natural world in all its dynamic intricacy and to blend that world so intimately with her female concerns.” She received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. from The University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. from Columbia. She was also the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Trudy divided her time between a cabin in Wyoming and her family’s homestead in New Jersey. She died in December 2024.
