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A novice fifth-grade teacher embarks on a clandestine love affair with another teacher, which sets her on the tumultuous path of self-discovery.
It is 1963, one of the most turbulent years in American history. The escalating tensions and conflicts in society at large are playing out in classrooms, principals’ offices, and school boards across the country, along with the first stirrings of social transformation, though the past still holds its suffocating grip. And behind the closed door of the teachers’ room in one small Midwest town, two teachers set eyes on each other and find it hard to look away.
Karen Murphy, fresh from college, has taken on her first teaching job. Despite her best efforts, she can’t seem to stick to the subjects in her fifth-grade school books, helped along by the antics of a girl who upends all her lesson plans. She has a lot to learn, and her women colleagues are there to offer their advice, especially the enigmatic fourth-grade teacher, Esther Jonas. As Karen quickly discovers, the devoted spinster teacher with no life beyond the classroom is a myth—the school is teeming with passion and secrets, her own perilous desire for Esther Jonas included.
The Teachers’ Room offers both a panoramic view of a changing America and an intimate portrait of the hidden lives of teachers.
“The Teachers’ Room is a remarkable novel. The presentation of the setting is beautifully evocative, truly recreating an era. And the historical background—1963 in the Midwest, teachers who had to be closeted or risk everything—was such an important and pivotal time in American social history. But The Teachers’ Room is never dry history. The plot will make the reader keep turning the pages. Most of all, The Teachers’ Room is a wonderful read—engaging, vivid in its depictions, deeply interesting in its characterizations, and very moving.” —Lillian Faderman, renowned scholar of lesbian and LGBT history and literature
Award-winning playwright Lydia Stryk was born and raised in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire and flying ears of corn. After high school, she trained at the Drama Centre in London and pursued an acting career in New York for exactly one year before returning to school to study History and Education. She substitute-taught in New York City public schools, observing the social lives of children and the inner workings of the education system with fascination, and she completed a doctorate in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, “Acting Hysteria: An Analysis of the Actress and Her Part,” was an attempt to understand why her own short-lived experience acting the woman’s part felt pathological. Her plays have been produced across the country and beyond. The Teachers’ Room is her first novel. www.lydiastryk.com
Kia Corthorn is the author of the novels The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, winner of the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and Moon and the Mars which was released in 2021. She is also an internationally produced playwright, garnering the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, and the Horton Foote Prize, among others. She lives in Harlem, New York City.