Bingham Award for a debut collection and the Hillsdale Award. The first, Insurrections, won the PEN Robert W. The World Doesn’t Require You is Scott’s second published collection set in the world of Cross River, a fictional city founded after a successful slave rebellion. It was a fitting beginning to a conversation about a book that is, as much at it is about the weight and occasional absurdity of race and history and the making of shared identity, also about the strange sense of community and loneliness that pervades academia. I also ran into multiple friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen in years, both of whom pointed me in the right direction to Scott’s office. When I went to campus to see the writer, I got lost four separate times in a labyrinthe humanities building not unlike the one I work in on a different campus. He got an earlier peek at the book on store shelves during a family trip to a local bookstore, where his son and would-be publicist was so excited to see it that he held the book up and began yelling at passing patrons to “Come see the writer Rion Amilcar Scott!” Though rave reviews had been pouring in all week, his new story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You had been properly launched at DC’s Politics and Prose just the night before.
He had only been assigned an office the day before, but had already taught his first class and was preparing for the second.
It was Rion Scott’s first week as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and by any measure it had been a busy one.
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