After retiring from a career in academe, Brian Duren launched a new career as an author of literary fiction. He writes novels with an introspective quality about nomadic characters who travel through time and space, always returning to what haunts them. His first novel, Whiteout, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Midwestern Fiction. Peter Geye lauded Duren’s second book, Ivory Black, as “a novel of profound elegance,” while Junot Diaz described his next novel, The Gravity of Love, as “a magnificent haunting duet of grief, absence, and the unshakable bonds of family…”