Join us in Ithaca, NY, at the 2026 Freund Prize Reading in celebration of Sophia Veltfort’s reception of the award for This Vital Absence. This event is hosted on Cornell University’s campus and is free and open to the public!
About the event
The Department of Literatures in English celebrates the winners of the 2026 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing in recognition of excellence in publication.
The alumni prize is supported by the Philip Freund '29 endowment and comes with a $5000 award and an invitation to participate in the Freund Prize Reading in the fall semester.
The 2026 Freund Prize Reading will take place on Thursday, November 12 at 5:00 p.m. in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall KG70. Recipients will read from their award-winning work. Books by the authors will be available for purchase thanks to Ithaca's local cooperative Non-profit bookstore Buffalo Street Books, and a book signing will follow the reading.
Seductive, unsettling, and impossible to put down, This Vital Absence is a novel about inheritance that transforms into an uneasy reckoning with the stories we tell to survive.
Sylvia is the daughter of two loving mothers, but she has always wanted to know her father. When she moves back to New York City, a dossier arrives from her moms, with a new lead: Dean, an anesthesiologist who may bear some responsibility in the death of a pop star. At the same time, Sylvia meets Molly, a woman with her own family mysteries, with whom she makes a deal: they will help each other in the search for each other’s biological families. These three are drawn into a series of narrative games, games that leave Sylvia and Molly reeling and faced with a choice about the kinds of stories in which they are willing to participate. With the propulsive prose and psychological intensity of Patricia Highsmith, Veltfort probes questions of inheritance and intimacy, the allure of obsession, and misunderstandings that shape our lives.
Sophia Veltfort's fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Digest online (first place, Annual Writing Competition), the Santa Monica Review, Narrative online (30 Below Contest finalist), the Chicago Tribune online (Nelson Algren finalist), Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harvard Review and been selected as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays. After graduating from Yale, she studied on a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford and the University of East Anglia, then completed a Joint MFA / PhD at Cornell. She grew up in New York City with her two moms, three cats, and four avocado plants, and she currently teaches creative writing at Yale.