Featured Events & Readers

Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.

Disability’s Influence on Literature: Realism As A Craft Concept

Wednesday, March 3 2021
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Marlena Chertock
  

  Marlena Chertock has two books of poetry, Crumb-Sized: Poems and On That One-Way Trip to Mars. She uses her skeletal dysplasia as a bridge to scientific poetry. Marlena is a bisexual poet and serves on the planning committee for OutWrite, Washington, DC’s annual LGBTQ literary festival.
  

• Eileen Cronin
  

  Eileen Cronin’s Mermaid, translated in 3 languages, was one of O Magazine’s Best Memoirs of the Year. She’s held fellowships with Vermont Studio Center and American Psychological Association. She won the Washington Writing Prize in fiction. She's a writing instructor and a psychologist at UCLA.
  

• James Tate Hill
  

  James Tate Hill’s memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2021. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. He is the fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and a contributing editor for Literary Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column. The 2019 and 2020 editions of Best American Essays list his work among the Notable Essays.

• T. K. Dalton
  

  T. K. Dalton's writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in Apogee,The Millions, Southeast Review, Tahoma Literary Review, The Common, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. He recently completed work on The Intimate Register, a memoir for which he is actively seeking representation. A founding editor of The Deaf Poets Society, a digital journal publishing disability literature and art that will publish its ninth issue this spring, Tim has taught writing at the college level since 2005. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently earning a PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

AWP Award Series Reading

Wednesday, March 3 2021
7:30 p.m. CT to 8:30 p.m. CT

• Cécile Barlier
  

  Cécile Barlier was born in France, and received her master’s degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris. Three of her short, “ A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations, ”,“Forgetting, ” and ”MRI,“ have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. “Forgetting” is featured in Epiphany’s 30th anniversary anthology.Her work is featured or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Bacopa Literary Review (first place for fiction, 2012), Blue Lake Review, Clare Literary Journal, Crack the Spine, Cerise Press, Delmarva Review, Euphony Journal, The Emerson Review, Gold Man Review, Gone Lawn, Knee-Jerk, The Lindenwood Review, The Meadow, New Delta Review, Penmen Review, Red Savina Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Serving House Journal, Sou’wester, StreetLight Magazine, Summerset Review, Sweet Tree Review, The Tower Journal, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Wax Paper, and Whistling Shade.

• Joy Priest
  

  Joy Priest’s poems and essays appear in numerous publications. Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as senior editor for Yemassee Journal. She is a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Poetry.

• Robert Shuster
  

  Robert Shuster received a 2011 James Jones First Novel Fellowship for To Zenzi when the book was still in progress. His short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Witness, The Mississippi Review, and Stone Canoe (among other publications) and in the anthologies Micro Fiction (W.W. Norton) and Yellow Silk II (Warner Books). His short story, “A Solution to the Barber Paradox,” was the 2014 winner of The Winter Anthology contest. In 2005, he was the recipient of a research fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society for his writings on war. For several years, he wrote art reviews for The Village Voice. Read more at robertshuster.com.

• Megan Harlan
  

  Megan Harlan’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and Cincinnati Review and have been awarded the Arts & Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction (2018) and cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018. Her first book, Mapmaking (BkMk Press/New Letters), won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. She holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Creative Writing Program and works as a writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A Reading & Conversation with Mira Jacob & Monique Truong, Sponsored by Kundiman

Thursday, March 4 2021
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Mira Jacob
  

  Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. She currently teaches at the New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to Williamsburg.

• Monique Truong
  

  Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits. Recipient of a Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a former refugee, novelist, essayist, lyricist/librettist, avid eater, and retired intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order). She serves as vice president of the Authors Guild and is a member of the Creative Advisory Council for Hedgebrook and Advisory Committee of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).
  (Photo Credit: Haruka Sakaguichi)

• Crystal Hana Kim
  

  Crystal Hana Kim’s novel If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, Literary Hub, and others. A 2017 PEN America/Dau Short Story Prize winner, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Jentel, and more. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.
  (Photo Credit: Margarita Coporan)

A Reading & Conversation with Shira Erlichman, Sumita Chakraborty, and Taylor Johnson, moderated by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Thursday, March 4
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Shira Erlichman
  

  Shira Erlichman is a poet, musician, and visual artist. She was born in Israel and immigrated to the US at age six. Her poems explore recovery––of language, of home, of mind––and value the "scattered wholeness" of healing. She earned a BA at Hampshire College and has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, and a residency by the Millay Colony. Her debut poetry book, Odes to Lithium, came out in September 2019. She is the author and illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold.

  contact:shira.erlichman@gmail.com

• Cortney Lamar Charleston
  

  Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow from the Chicago suburbs. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. He began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry is a marriage between art and activism and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He currently serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus.
  contact:charleston.poetry@gmail.com
  (Photo Credit: Jeremy Michael Clark)

• Sumita Chakraborty
  

  Sumita Chakrabortyis a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Best American Poetry 2019, and elsewhere, and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, Modernism/modernity, College Literature. She holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD from Emory University. She was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Originally from Massachusetts, she now lives in Michigan, where she is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

• Taylor Johnson
  

  Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. Their poems appear in, or will appear in, The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and The Paris Review. They've received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Conversation Literary Festival, among other organizations. Taylor lives in southern Louisiana, where they listen.

PEN Presents: Jennifer Egan & Yiyun Li

Friday, March 5
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Jennifer Egan
  

  Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, and several others. Also a journalist, she has written frequently for the New York Times Magazine—most recently about pregnancy and childbirth among opioid-dependent women. She is the former president of PEN America.
  

• Yiyun Li
  

  Yiyun Li is the author of four novels, two story collections, and a book of essays, including PEN/Jean Stein award-winning Where Reasons End, and her most recent novel, Must I Go. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and other places. She has received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation and is a 2020 winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She teaches at Princeton University.

American Harvest & White Flights: Marie Mockett and Jess Row in Conversation, Sponsored by Graywolf Press

Friday, March 5, 2021
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Fiona McCraie
  

  Fiona McCrae has been director and publisher of Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press since 1994, following 11 years with the British publishers Faber and Faber. Authors that McCrae has published at Graywolf include Mary Szybist, Max Porter, Anna Burns, Daisy Johnson, Elizabeth Alexander, Per Petterson, and Percival Everett. She currently serves on the board of the Anderson Center and as vice-chair of the board of the National Book Foundation. McCrae received the Golden Colophon Award for leadership from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses in 2014, and in 2017 she and Jeff Shotts received the Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers.
  

• Marie Mockett
  

  Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, as well as a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.
  (Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

• Jess Row
  

  Jess Row is the author of White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, as well as the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and ,em>Nobody Ever Gets Lost. White Flights is his first book of nonfiction. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he teaches at the College of New Jersey.
  (Photo Credit: Sarah Shatz)

NBCC Presents: Edwidge Danticat and Sarah M. Broom on Finding Home

Friday, March 5, 2021
8:00 p.m. CT to 9:00 p.m. CT

• Sarah Broom
  

  Sarah Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, and O Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for her memoir, The Yellow House. A native New Orleanian, she received her Master of Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in Harlem.

• Edwidge Danticat
  

  Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection;Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; Create Dangerously; Claire of the Sea Light; the memoir Brother, I'm Dying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography; and the story collection Everything Inside, which won the NBCC’s fiction award. She also is the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize and the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award.

• Jane Ciabattari
  

  Jane Ciabattari is the National Book Critics Circle VP/Awards & Events (and a former National Book Critics Circle president), the author of the story collection Stealing the Fire, a regular contributor to BBC Culture and Lit Hub, and a member of the Writers Grotto. She serves on the advisory boards of The Story Prize, Bay Area Book Festival, and Lit Camp, and is a Pushcart Prize contributing editor.

• Marion Winik, Moderator
  

  A University of Baltimore professor,Marion Winik serves on the the National Book Critics Circle Board. She is the author of The Big Book of the Dead, winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her nine other books are New York Times Notable First Comes Love (1996) and Above Us Only Sky (2020). Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR.

A Reading & Conversation with Ada Limón, Jake Skeets, and Rick Barot Sponsored by Milkweed Editions

Saturday, March 6
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Ada Limón
  

  Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top five books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things, was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte low-residency MFA program and the online and summer programs for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
  Photo Credit: Lucas Marquardt
  

• Jake Skeets
  

  Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water's Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series-winning collection. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
  Photo Credit: Quanah Yazzie
  

• Rick Barot
  

  Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of The Galleons, as well as three previous collections of poems: The Darker Fall; Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord.Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

Fierce L.A. Women Write Stories that Change the Paradigm, Sponsored by Red Hen Press

Saturday, March 6, 2021
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Aimee Bender
  

  Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), a New York Times Notable Book; An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), a Los Angeles Times pick of the year; Willful Creatures (2005); The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), which won the SCIBA award for best fiction; and The Color Master, a New York Times Notable book for 2013. Her latest novel is The Butterfly Lampshade (2020). She lives in Los Angeles with her family and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

• Lisa Teasley
  

  Lisa Teasley is the author of the acclaimed novels Heat Signature and Dive and the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark. She is the writer/presenter of the BBC television documentary High School Prom and has taught fiction at UCLA, UC Riverside, and CalArts. Lisa is also senior fiction editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Dana Johnson
  

  Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark; the novel Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and Elsewhere, California. Both novels were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

• Susan Straight
  

  Susan Straight's new memoir In the Country of Women was published in 2019 by Catapult and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR's Code Switch, Real Simple, and others. She is the author of eight novels, including Highwire Moon and A Million Nightingales. Her new novel, Mecca, will be published by FSG in 2021. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family and is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UCRiverside.

• Aimee Liu (Moderator)
  

  Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face.

Grove Atlantic Presents Viet Thanh Nguyen, in Conversation with Kristen Millares Young

Saturday, March 6, 2021
8:00 p.m. CT to 9:00 p.m. CT

• Viet Thanh Nguyen
  

  Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside six other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees, the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. This year, he became the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He lives in Los Angeles.
  

• Kristen Millares Young
  

  Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press). Named a staff pick by The Paris Review, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards in 2020. Her essays and investigations appear most recently in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Guardian, and the anthologies Alone Together, Latina Outsiders and Advanced Creative Nonfiction. The 2018-2020 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.
  (Photo Credit: Jenn Furber)












Tribute to June Jordan, sponsored by Copper Canyon

Sunday, March 7
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Jericho Brown
  

  Jericho Brown is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, and his first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is an associate professor and the director of the creative writing program at Emory University.

• Michael Wiegers
  

  Michael Wiegers is editor in chief at Copper Canyon Press. He has edited two volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet’s Child and This Art and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he coedited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative and speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world.

• Rio Cortez
  

  Rio Cortez has received fellowships and awards from the Poet's House, Cave Canem, and CantoMundo foundations. She has won a Sarah Lawrence College Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry , a Poets & Writers Amy Award , and a Jerome Foundation grant. Rio was selected by Ross Gay as the inaugural winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains. Her debut children's book, ABC's of Black History , was released in 2020. She now lives and writes in Harlem, and she works as a sales and retail marketing manager at HarperCollins and an editor at large at Copper Canyon Press.

• Monica Sok
  

  Monica Sok, author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On, is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. Her work has been recognized with a Discovery Prize from the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Jerome Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Sok was a 2018–2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and teaches poetry at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants and Banteay Srei in Oakland, California.

• June Jordan
  

  June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children’s books, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and her articles appeared in The Village Voice, the New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. After her death in 2002, a school in San Francisco was renamed in her honor.




Legacy Conversations: C. S. Giscombe and Nathaniel Mackey, sponsored by Cave Canem

Sunday, March 7
6:30 p.m. CT to 7:30 p.m. CT

• C. S. Giscombe
  

  C. S. Giscombe is the author of several collections of poetry, including Prairie Style, Giscome Road, and Here. He has also written prose in such works as Into and Out of Dislocation, Border Towns, and Ohio Railroads, a poem in essay form. Giscombe is the recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award, the American Book Award, and the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has two poetry texts forthcoming in 2021: Similarly, a volume of new and selected works, and Train Music, a collaboration with the painter Judith Margolis. Giscombe teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and is a long-distance cyclist.
  

• Nathaniel Mackey
  

  Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Blue Fasa. His honors include the National Book Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Double Trio, a boxed set of three new books of poetry, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2021. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.

• Jari Bradley
  

  Jari Bradley (they/them) is a Black genderqueer poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. They have received fellowships and support from Callaloo, Cave Canem, Tin House, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Heinz Endowments. Bradley’s work has been published in The Adroit Journal, Blood Orange Review, The Offing, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day),Callaloo, Columbia Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Bradley received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is the 2020–2021 First Wave Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.