Creative Writing Events 2024-25
Monday, Sept 30th, 2024 at 4:10 pm
Kirby 104 with a reception to follow in the lobby.
Closs Writer-in-Residence Reading, Q&A and book signing: SUSAN CHOI
SUSAN CHOI’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, and in 2021 she received the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for “Flashlight.” She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Sponsored by: Department of English
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024 at 5:30 pm:
WCA 108 (Williams Center for the Arts)
Fall Arts Festival | Creative Writing readings: Mikael Awake, Christian Campbell, Meg Fernandes, Jennifer Gilmore, Lisa Hiton, and Lee Upton
MIKAEL AWAKE has contributed essays to The New Yorker, GQ, Bookforum, The Awl, and, most recently, the anthology Where Is Africa: Volume One. With Daniel R. Day, he is the co-author of Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, a New York Times bestseller. His nonfiction book on playground basketball mecca Rucker Park is forthcoming from Pantheon.
CHRISTIAN CAMPBELL is a Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist, and cultural critic, and the author of Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and the Cave Canem Prize among other awards. Running the Dusk was also translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo (Ediciones Santiago, 2015). He lives in New York City.
MEG FERNANDES is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told, published by Tin House, received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and was named a Best or Most-Anticipated Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Vulture, Autostraddle, LitHub, among others. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Yaddo Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, etc. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
JENNIFER GILMORE is the critically acclaimed author of five novels, including The Mothers (Scribner), which was featured on “Fresh Air” and is currently being adapted to film, Something Red (Scribner), a New York Times Notable Book, and Golden Country (Scribner), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Harold U Ribalow Prize. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Bookforum, Harper’s Magazine, the Forward, the Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, the New York Times, Real Simple, Salon, the Washington Post, and Vogue. Gilmore has been a MacDowell fellow and has taught creative writing and literature at Barnard, Cornell, Harvard, New York University, the New School, Princeton, and Sarah Lawrence. She is currently in the English Department at Lafayette College.
LISA HITON’s debut book of poems, debut book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize at Tupelo Press. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in New South, Linebreak, The Paris-American, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and LAMBDA Literary among others. She is the founder and co-director of Queer Poem-a-Day at the Deerfield Public Library.
MAGGIE MILLNER is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of The Atlantic’s ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review. Maggie was the 2020–’21 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–’20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–’18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where they received their MFA. They are also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
LEE UPTON writes in multiple genres. Her comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, set at two literary conferences ten years apart, is due out in 2025 from Sagging Meniscus. A third novel, The Withers, asks questions about how self-trust can be reclaimed even in the most unjust and horrifying circumstances and will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing.