Garth Greenwell
Wednesday, September 25, 6 p.m.
Tyler Haynes Commons, Room 305
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over 50 publications in nine countries, and is being translated into 14 languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over 30 other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming from FSG in September 2024. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, and Princeton. Greenwell currently lives in New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.
Susan Kiyo Ito
Wednesday, October 9, 6 p.m.
Carole Weinstein International Center Commons
Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Literature, and named a best book of 2023 by Library Journal. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Catapult, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She teaches at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University.
Idra Novey
Monday, October 21, 6 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Idra Novey’s most recent novel, Take What You Need, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and it was named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and her second novel, Those Who Knew, was a finalist for the Clark Fiction Prize. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages, and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She teaches fiction writing at Princeton University. Her third book of poetry, Soon and Wholly, will appear in September 2024.
Megan Fernandes
Thursday, March 20, 6 p.m.
Location TBD
Megan Fernandes is the author of three books of poetry: The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015), Good Boys (Tin House, 2020), and I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023). She has published her work in The New Yorker, Chicago Review, Boston Review, and McSweeney’s, among other places. A South Asian American writer living in New York City, she was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans. Fernandes is an associate professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University.,
Past 2023-2024 Events
Rachel Beanland
Wednesday, October 4, 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Rachel Beanland is the author of The House Is on Fire, which was named an Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association, a ‘GMA Buzz Pick’ by Good Morning America, and one of the Best Books of 2023 (thus far) by The New Yorker. Her first novel, Florence Adler Swims Forever, was published in 2020 and received the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Beanland earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, Virginia where she is the 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Richmond.
Laura Sims
Thursday, November 9, 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Laura Sims is the author of How Can I Help You and the critically acclaimed novel Looker, now in development for television with eOne and Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, and more. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.
Multiversal Rally: On Neurodivergence and Poetics
February 7-9
This three-day multisensory event, brought to you by the School of Arts & Sciences Humanities Program and co-sponsored by the Department of English Writers Series, looks at the relationship between attention, poetics, and love through a cluster of readings, performances, conversations, interventions, and workshops. Featured guests include Chris Martin, author of May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodivergent Future and four volumes of poetry; Adam Wolfond, a nonspeaking autistic poet, who is the author of two chapbooks and was the youngest poet ever to appear in the American Academy of Poets “poem-a-day” series; Wolfond’s mother, Estée Klar, a visual artist and academic; and JJJJJJerome Ellis, whose work moves across sound, ritual, visualties, and printed words and whose book, Aster of Ceremonies, is forthcoming.
C. Pam Zhang
Tuesday, March 19, 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Born in Beijing, C. Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of Land of Milk and Honey and How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature; nominated for the Booker Prize; and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.
Shane McCrae
Tuesday, April 16, 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Shane McCrae is the author of the memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping and ten books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and most recently Cain Named the Animal. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.