Spring 2022
For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
In-person attendance open to the Cornell community––Cornell ID required. Livestream is available via Zoom (details in event listings below).
Adherence to university public health guidelines is required. Visit covid.cornell.edu for the latest information.
We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To be respectful of those with allergies and environmental sensitivities, we ask that you please refrain from wearing strong fragrances. Reading venues are wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by J. Robert Lennon & Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Thursday, February 24, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series begins with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring literatures in English faculty: novelist J. Robert Lennon and poet, writer, and scholar Mukoma Wa Ngugi.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of three story collections and nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, and his criticism in The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. Lennon is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the author of recently released Unbury Our Dead with Song; as well as The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership; the novels Black Star Nairobi and Nairobi Heat; and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. His novel Mrs. Shaw was released in Eastern Africa as We, the Scarred in 2020. Nairobi Heat has just been optioned by a major Hollywood studio.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/93391601147?pwd=TVJWcEFXSGwxRE1yb0tJbERFZm1SUT09
Passcode: 349124
Book signing to follow.
Reading by Ling Ma
Thursday, March 10, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by fiction writer, Kirkus Prize winner, & alumna Ling Ma (MFA '15).
Ling Ma is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance, which won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018, it has been translated into seven languages. Ma's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, Buzzfeed, and more. Her fellowships include a Whiting Award and an NEA creative writing fellowship. Ma was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah and Kansas. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.
Books by Ling Ma will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96305762726?pwd=UXZvUS9oeHdEYnRMM2lqd0ZrbUtSQT09
Passcode: 039102
Book signing to follow.
Reading by M. NourbeSe Philip
Thursday, April 14, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by poet & PEN/Nabokov Award winner M. NourbeSe Philip.
Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practiced law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem, Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos; and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Zong! was named the 2021 winner of World Literature Today’s (WLT) 21 Books for the 21st Century. Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council) and the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto), and Dora Award finalist (Drama). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers' retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She is also the 2021 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, the Molson Prize, for her “invaluable contributions to literature.”
In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92766493646?pwd=OVI3enJwM3J5SG5UOGZENWQzczB0QT09
Passcode: 555562
Books by M. NourbeSe Philip will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
Book signing to follow.
Reading by Bao Phi
Thursday, April 28, 5:00 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium
132 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series concludes with a reading by Vietnamese American multigenre writer Bao Phi.
Bao Phi is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, whose poetry is included in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology and published widely elsewhere, including two collections published by Coffee House Press as well as other collections and magazines such as Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Poetry Magazine, Asian-American Literary Review, and many others. His fiction and essays have appeared in Octavia's Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, and others. He is also known for his three children’s books: his A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions. Phi is a visiting critic in the Department of Literatures in English during the 2021-2022 academic year.
Books by Bao Phi will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92092286517?pwd=d0RJdndPV3FOK3FraDZJZVAyODRMUT09
Passcode: 386941
Book signing to follow.
Additional Spring 2022 Creative Writing Event
"Frog in the Mouth": A Virtual Reading by Zahid Rafiq
Thursday, March 3, 10:00 a.m. ET
View the event recording here
Writer, journalist, and alumnus Zahid Rafiq (MFA ’21) will read from his short story collection. The reading will be followed by conversation and a brief question and answer session.
Zahid Rafiq is a writer and journalist based in Kashmir. He is a recent alumnus of the Cornell MFA Program in Creative Writing and is working on a collection of short stories set in Kashmir.
Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Fall 2021
Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Free & open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance.
Masks & adherence to university public health guidelines required. For the latest information visit covid.cornell.edu.
If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible.
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading by Ada Limón
Thursday, September 23, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
View the event recording here
The Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series premieres with a reading by poet & National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón.Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Find out more at www.adalimon.net.
Books by Ada Limón will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
Book signing to follow.
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading is a biennial event, featuring a public reading by a distinguished poet. It was established in 1980 by Margaret Rosenzweig, '32, in memory of Robert Chasen.
Reading by Ed Skoog
Thursday, October 21, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
View the event recording here
The Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by poet Ed Skoog.Ed Skoog is the author of four books of poems, most recently Travelers Leaving for the City. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Books by Ed Skoog will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
Book signing to follow.
Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance. For latest guidelines visit covid.cornell.edu.
Reading by Angie Cruz
Thursday, October 28, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium
G70 Klarman Hall
Angie Cruz.
Angie Cruz is the author of the novel Dominicana, shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, and the novels Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, a finalist in 2007 for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has published short fiction and essays in numerous magazines and journals, including VQR, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, the New York Times and Small Axe. Cruz has taught creative writing for over 15 years in academic and nontraditional settings. She is Editor-in-Chief of Aster(ix) Journal, a dedicated space for literature, art and criticism by and about women. Cruz holds a BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Born and raised in the Washington Heights section of New York City, she has returned to the neighborhood after living in Texas and Pittsburgh.
Books by Angie Cruz will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
Book signing to follow.
Additional Fall 2021 Creative Writing Event
The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Julie Phillips Brown, Lena Nguyen, Michael Prior, & Renia White
Thursday, November 11, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
View the event recording here
Recipients of the 2021 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing in recognition of excellence in publication will read from their works:
Julie Phillips Brown, MFA '08, PhD '11, Poet
Julie Phillips Brown is an interdisciplinary poet, artist, critic, and editor. She is the author of The Adjacent Possible, winner of the Hopper Poetry Prize, and the founding editor of House Mountain Review. She has held research fellowships in contemporary poetry and poetics from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Recent work appears in Revolute, The Rumpus, Twyckenham Notes, Vassar Review, and elsewhere.
Lena Nguyen, MFA '16, Novelist
The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Lena Nguyen taught courses in English, writing, vampires, and zombies at Cornell, and has studied writing all over the country, including at Harvard, Stanford, and Brown University. Her science fiction and fantasy have won several accolades, and WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE, her debut novel, was a Booklist starred review and an Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Science Fiction. Lena also works as a game developer and is currently writing her second novel.
Michael Prior, MFA '17, Poet
Michael Prior is the author of Burning Province (2020), which won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in places like The New Republic, Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets's Poem-a-Day Series. The recent recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the Jerome Foundation, Prior is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.
Renia White, MFA '16, Writer
Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation, a Blessing the Boats Selection forthcoming in Spring 2022. Originally from Maryland, she came of age in Riverdale, GA before earning her BA and MFA from Howard and Cornell University, respectively. She received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in NYC.
Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.
Book signing to follow.
Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication.
Spring 2021
Spring 2021
Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together
For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar
All events are free & open to the public
If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Valzhyna Mort & Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thursday, February 25, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
The Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring poet Valzhyna Mort and author Nafissa Thompson-Spires.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears, Collected Body and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. Her work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation fellowship, the Amy Clampitt fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. Outside the US, she has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). Mort is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was also longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Root, The White Review, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications, and work is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. Thompson-Spires is the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing in both the MFA and undergrad programs.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
Talk by Rita P. Davis
Thursday, March 11, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
Executive Counsel Rita P. Davis will talk about her personal journey into activism from an English major.
Ms. Davis majored in English at Washington and Lee University. After graduating, she spent three and a half years as a police officer with the Lynchburg City Police Department. Ms. Davis attended the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. After graduating magna cum laude, Ms. Davis clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. Following her clerkship, she joined Hunton and Williams LLP, now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. After 15 years, Ms. Davis joined the Office of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia as Section Chief for Trials in the Civil Litigation Division. She was the first female and the first African American to hold that position. The Honorable Ralph S. Northam, Governor of Virginia appointed Ms. Davis as Counsel in January of 2018. She is the first woman to hold that position.
This is the second virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading by Charif Shanahan
Thursday, March 18, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
Poet Charif Shanahan will read from his work.Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award, and winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Shanahan’s poems appear in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, and in the recent anthologies, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018; ed. Tracy K. Smith) and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020; ed. Kevin Young). Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs at Northwestern University.
This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
This is the third virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Reading by Camonghne Felix
Thursday, April 8, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
Poet, writer, and political strategist Camonghne Felix will read from her work.
Camonghne Felix, M.A. is a poet, a writer, speaker, & political strategist. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an M.F.A. from Bard College, & has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, & Poets House. Formerly the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications at Elizabeth Warren for President, Camonghne is the VP of Strategic Communications at Blue State. Her first full-length collection of poems, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books), was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. Felix's forthcoming collection of poems, Dyscalculia, & essay collection, Let the Poets Govern, are forthcoming from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Felix's work has been published in BuzzFeed, Poetry Magazine, Apogee, The Offing, the Academy of American Poets website, & more.
This is the fourth virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Reading by Susan Choi
Thursday, April 22, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
Alumna, novelist, and winner of the National Book Award Susan Choi will read from her work.
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. Her first book for children, Camp Tiger, was also published in 2019. Born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, Choi was raised there and in Houston, Texas. She studied literature at Yale and writing at Cornell (MFA '95) and worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.
This is the fifth virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Reading by Carolyn Forché
Thursday, April 29, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here
Poet and memoirist Carolyn Forché will read from her work.
Carolyn Forché's first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In March 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She has received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and Award. She is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and is a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Fall 2020
Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home
Reading by Michael Prior | Poet
Thursday, September 24, 7:00 p.m.
View the event recording here
Poet, professor, and alumnus Michael Prior (MFA '17) reads from his magnificent new collection, Burning Province."In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, my Japanese grandparents and their families were stripped of their property and assets and put in an internment camp in British Columbia. The book responds to this injustice by thinking through how those years in the camp and the resulting diaspora (Japanese-Canadian families weren’t allowed back to the coast for four years after the War) have affected my family and shaped my own mixed-race experience."
Michael Prior is the author of two poetry collections, Burning Province (2020) and Model Disciple (2016), which was named one of the best books of the year by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies across North America and the UK, including The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Global Poetry Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. The recipient of awards and honors for poetry and teaching, and a former Hawthornden and Banff Centre Fellow, Michael holds graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He divides his time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Macalester College. Find out more at michaelpriorwriter.com.
This is the first virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. Now from the intimacy of their homes to ours, the Zalaznick literary series brings renowned writers to Cornell to share their work. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Craft Talk by M. Evelina Galang | Writer & Activist
Thursday, October 15, 7:00 p.m.
View the event recording here
Truth or Dare: Grounding Beautiful Sorrow, Beautiful Sky in Historical Accuracy
This craft talk by writer, activist, and professor M. Evelina Galang asks, “What is a writer’s responsibility in creating fiction? How does a fiction writer fact-check herself?” This talk provides insight into the research process—with a glimpse into Galang's newest manuscript—and explores the importance of doing research when writing fiction.
"I once had a teacher say that fiction is a fine blend of memory and imagination, but as I continue to explore the lives of characters rooted in the experience of my ancestors, my community, and in response to specific moments in time, I see the importance of getting not only detail, but context, atmosphere and perspective right. I revise my teacher’s definition of fine fiction to read—a fluid blend of memory, imagination and historical research."
M. Evelina Galang has been named one of the 100 most influential Filipinas in the United States and at-large by the Filipina Women’s Network. She is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self, novels One Tribe and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War is Galang’s creative nonfiction work documenting the testimonies of 16 surviving Filipina “comfort women” and their fight for justice. Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for One Tribe, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). Find out more at mevelinagalang.com.
Shop Talk by Wah-Ming Chang | Writer & Editor
Thursday, October 29, 7:00 p.m.
View the event recording here
Conversation with other writers has been foundational to Wah-Ming Chang’s work, from her graduate student years, through the arc of her career in the publishing industry—successful freelancer to Senior Managing Editor at Catapult—and in the cultivation of her rich post-MFA community. Writer, editor, and alumna (MFA ’06) Wah-Ming Chang will share insider experiences and insights, and her approach to the creative process.“This work we've committed ourselves to involves a constellation of action and inaction around writing, thinking, collaborating, and dreaming.”
Wah-Ming Chang received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, and received grants in fiction from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, twice for the New York Foundation for the Arts, and other organizations. Her writing has appeared in Mississippi Review, Joyland, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere, and she is writing an album of fiction called Dreamstamps. She has worked in publishing for the past twenty years, and is currently the Vice President of Company Culture and Senior Managing Editor at Catapult. The Low-Key Reading Party gatherings started meeting on Zoom in March 2020. Find out more at wmcisnowhere.com.
Triangle Breathing: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, moderated by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Tuesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.
View the event recording here
"We will think through the implications of the 2020 elections, including the necessity for police reform, and discuss how, since the murder of George Floyd, what has happened in the U.S. has become a matter of global attention. Topics will include the Black Lives Matter movement and the state of law and order. How can 'law and order' be assured in a society of such breathtaking lawlessness?"
Hortense Spillers is considered a foundational figure in Black feminist scholarship. A literary critic and brilliant essayist, Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her PhD from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory and Cornell Universities, among others. She lectures widely both at home and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. Her collection of scholarly essays, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), includes her landmark 1987 article, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—one of the most cited essays in African American literary studies today. Her co-edited works include Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. She co-founded with Tamura Lomax The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to providing socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a self-described Queer Black Troublemaker and a Black Feminist Love Evangelist. As the first person to do archival research in the papers of Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Lucille Clifton while achieving her PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University, she honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. Her triptych of experimental works, published by Duke University Press, includes Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018) and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). Gumbs’ poetry and fiction appear in many creative journals and has been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award. She is currently Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies, as well as in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow. Find out more at www.alexispauline.com.
This is the fourth virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Additional Fall 2020 Creative Writing Event
Writers & Poets Faculty Reading Series
Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays, November 30 – December 21, 10:00 a.m.
Faculty in the Creative Writing Program recorded short videos throughout the Fall 2020 semester, each reading a selection from their own work. An exhortation by alumna Toni Morrison (M.A. ’55) was the inspiration for the project. Morrison famously wrote, “we speak, we write, we do language,” in considering the artist’s task in troubled times.
“The video project is to reaffirm to our students and wider community how seriously we take our twin duties as artists and professors,” said Creative Writing Program director Ishion Hutchinson. “‘We do language’ is our ethos. It is intrinsic to our writing, teaching, and programming.”
The Writers & Poets Faculty Reading Series begins on Monday, November 30 and continues with a new video release every other weekday until its final reading on Monday, December 21. The reading video release time will be 10 a.m. ET on the following dates:
Monday, November 30
Valzhyna Mort (Poetry) - View reading recording here
Wednesday, December 2
Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Friday, December 4
Helena María Viramontes (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Monday, December 7
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Poetry) - View reading recording here
Wednesday, December 9
J. Robert Lennon (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Friday, December 11
Ernesto Quiñonez (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Monday, December 14
Ishion Hutchinson (Poetry) - View reading recording here
Wednesday, December 16
Robert Morgan (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Friday, December 18
Emily Fridlund (Fiction) - View reading recording here
Monday, December 21
Joanie Mackwoski (Poetry) - View reading recording here
Links to view the readings will be found above and on Facebook. The link for each reading will become active on its release date at 10 a.m. ET, and released videos will remain available for viewing on the department YouTube channel.
We hope that these video readings connect and inspire students and the wider community during the last, virtual weeks of the semester.
Spring 2020
Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
The venues are wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us as soon as possible.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Emily Fridlund & Joanie Mackowski
Thursday, February 6, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Emily Fridlund, fiction writer, and Joanie Mackowski, poet.
Emily Fridlund’s first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, and Southwest Review. She grew up in Minnesota and teaches writing at Cornell University.
Joanie Mackowski’s collections of poems are The Zoo and View from a Temporary Window. She has won awards from the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. She believes that a poem is more like a living organism than like a written statement. An associate professor in Cornell University’s English Department and Creative Writing Program, she has previously worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading
CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Reading by M. Evelina Galang, Writer & Activist
The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with a reading by writer & activist M. Evelina Galang, Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.
M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self, novels One Tribe and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, the nonfiction work Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War, and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for One Tribe, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). She is the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading
CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Reading by Patrick Somerville, Screenwriter & Novelis
Patrick Someville is a novelist and screenwriter, and the creator of the series Maniac (Netflix), as well as two upcoming series, Station 11 and Made For Love (HBO Max). He got his start writing for television on the FX drama The Bridge and later wrote for the second and third seasons of HBO's The Leftovers. He is the author of two short story collections and the novels, This Bright River and The Cradle. He grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and lives with his wife and three kids in Los Angeles.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading
Spring 2020
Additional Spring 2020 Creative Writing Program Event
CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Creative Writing MFA Graduation Reading
Saturday, May 9, 3:00 p.m.
Venue TBA
The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading! Fiction writers Anum Asi, Kathryn Diaz, Carlos Rafael Gomez, Ashley Hand, and Sophia Veltfort, & poets Chi Le, Yessica Martinez, Anastasia McCray, and Jasmine Reid will share from their theses or other works-in-progress.
Fall 2019
Fall 2019
Fall 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
ALL EVENTS ARE FREE and open to the public
ASL Interpretation will be provided at these readings. The venues are wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us as soon as possible.
Reading by Jenny Xie
Thursday, September 19, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Jenny Xie, Acclaimed Chinese American Poet & National Book Award Finalist
Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of Eye Level, which was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Eye Level also received the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, was named a finalist for the National Book Award and a PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive, won the Drinking Gourd Prize. Xie holds degrees from Princeton University and NYU, and has received grants and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. Her work appears in POETRY, New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications. She has taught creative writing at NYU and Princeton University, and currently lives in New York.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
MorganFest Reading
Thursday, October 3, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
This reading is the culmination of a full-day celebration; see full MorganFest schedule on the English events page.
Featuring:
Robert Morgan, Poet & Novelist
Robert Morgan was born on October 3, 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. His early studies included music, science, and engineering, but writing proved to be his truest passion. His first published books were collections of poems, earthy in style and grounded in the rhythms of work. Though he continues to write poetry, Morgan has devoted much of his creative energy to short stories and novels that draw on the rich history of Appalachia, including the bestseller Gap Creek (1999) and Chasing the North Star (2016). Most recently Morgan has turned to biography, on subjects ranging from Daniel Boone to Edgar Allan Poe. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University, where he is now the Kappa Alpha Professor of English and much loved as a writer, poet, colleague, and mentor.
In honor of Morgan, three of his former students will read from their own works:
Elizabeth Holmes MFA '87, Poet
Elizabeth Holmes is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Passing Worlds: Tahiti in the Era of Captain Cook (LSU Press, 2018). She lives in Ithaca, New York, and works as a writer at Cornell University.
Lynn Powell MFA '80, Poet & Nonfiction Writer
Lynn Powell has published three books of poetry, including Season of the Second Thought, and a nonfiction book, Framing Innocence. Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, the Brittingham and the Felix Pollak Prizes in poetry, and the Studs & Ida Terkel Award for nonfiction. She teaches at Oberlin College.
Robert Schultz MFA '76, MA '78, PhD '81, Author & Artist
Robert Schultz’s work includes three poetry collections, a novel, a nonfiction work, and an art book. He has received an NEA Award, The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Balch Prize, and Cornell’s Corson Bishop Poetry Prize. Schultz’s artwork is held by the U.S. Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, and private collectors.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. Purchase books by the MorganFest Reading authors from the Campus Store before the reading to have them signed. Look for the MorganFest display.
Reading by Desiree Cooper
Thursday, October 24, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Desiree Cooper, Pulitzer Prize-nominated Journalist & Women's Rights Activist
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, has won numerous awards including 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hypertext Review, and Best African American Fiction 2010, among other publications. In 2018, she wrote, produced and co-directed “The Choice,” a short film about reproductive rights and recipient of the 2019 Berlin Flash Film Festival’s Outstanding Achievement Award, and an Award of Merit from the Los Angeles Best Short Film Festival. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for black poets.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Additional Fall 2019 Creative Writing Event
The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Dorothy Chan, Nicholas Friedman, Ruth Joffre, & Daniel Peña
Thursday, November 14, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Recipients of the 2019 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing for excellence in publication will read from their works:
Dorothy Chan BA '12, Poet
Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Chan is the Poetry Editor of Hobart and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.
Nicholas Friedman MFA '12, Poet
Nicholas Friedman is the author of Petty Theft, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, POETRY, Yale Review, and other venues. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives with his wife and son in Syracuse.
Ruth Joffre BA '11, Author
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Lightspeed, The Masters Review, Nashville Review, CutBank, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle and teaches at the Hugo House.
Daniel Peña MFA '12, Novelist
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. A Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar and former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, and NBC News among other outlets. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press.
Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Spring 2019
Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
ALL EVENTS ARE FREE and open to the public
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Robert Morgan & Ernesto Quiñónez
When: Feb. 7, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Robert Morgan, Poet & Novelist
Robert Morgan is the author of fifteen books of poems, most recently Terroir and Dark Energy. He has published eleven works of fiction, including Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star. Nonfiction works include Boone: A Biography and Lions of the West. Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A native of western North Carolina, he is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University.
Ernesto Quiñónez, Writer
Ernesto Quiñónez is a product of public education, from kindergarten to his Masters at the City College of New York. He is the author of the novel Bodega Dreams and an associate professor of English at Cornell University.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by Elissa Washuta
When: Mar. 14, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Elissa Washuta, Nonfiction Writer
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund, and Hugo House. Washuta is an assistant professor of creative writing at The Ohio State University.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading by Claudia Rankine
When: Apr. 18, 5:00 p.m.
Location: Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall
Claudia Rankine, Poet & Writer
Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry. Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine’s bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. She teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading is a biennial event, featuring a public reading by a distinguished poet. It was established in 1980 by Margaret Rosenzweig, '32, in memory of Robert Chasen.
Free admission - Ticket required. Tickets to this event will be available at the Willard Straight Resource Center (4th/Main floor) from Friday, March 1 and while supplies last. Doors will open at 4:30p.m.
Books by Claudia Rankine will be available for purchase at the reading
Other Spring 2019 Creative Writing Events
Shop Talk featuring Robert Casper
When: Apr. 25, 4:30 p.m.
Location: English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Robert Casper, Library of Congress
Robert Casper is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. Casper will talk about his own post-MFA degree experience and the career trajectory that built on that degree to reach his prestigious position, followed by a Q&A. This informal conversation may assist students in making their own career goals.
The founding publisher of the literary magazine jubilat, Robert Casper has worked for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (where he served on the board) and the Poetry Society of America. He also served as the poetry chair of the Brooklyn Borough President’s Literary Council; as a member of the Poetry Coalition, LitNet, and the National Writer’s Museum National Advisory Council; and as a judge/panelist for the National Endowment for the Art’s “Poetry Out Loud” competition and “Great American Read” initiative, the PBS “Great American Read” Advisory Panel, the National Student Poets Program, and the National Youth Poet Laureate initiative, among others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Matthea Harvey.
Refreshments will be served
In A Word featuring Ishion Hutchinson & Carol Boyce Davies, In Conversation
"Caribbean Migrations and Imperial Projects"
When: May 1, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
This installment will comprise a wide-ranging conversation about Ishion Hutchinson's and Carole Boyce Davies' creative and scholarly work archiving the Caribbean experience during global conflicts.
Ishion Hutchinson, Poet
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Carol Boyce Davies, Scholar
Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Cornell University. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Her most recent monograph is Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones and a children’s book, Walking.
In A Word is a series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of fiction writers and poets.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Reading
When: May. 11, 3:00 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading!
Fiction writers Remy Barnes, Nneoma Ike-Njoku, Alice Mercier and Charlotte Pattison, and poets Christopher Hewitt, Frances Revel, Sasha Smith and Alice Turski will share work from their theses or other works-in-progress.
Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Fall 2018
Fall 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
ALL EVENTS ARE FREE and open to the public
Reading by Gregory Pardlo
When: Sept. 27, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize-winning Author
Gregory Pardlo's collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading by Alice McDermott
When: Oct. 11, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Alice McDermott, Novelist
Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Her seventh novel, Someone, was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels—After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night—were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by Viet Thanh Nguyen
When: Oct. 25, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning Novelist & Cultural Critic
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Additional Fall 2018 Creative Writing Event
The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Catherine Chung, Ezra Dan Feldman, Sara Eliza Johnson, & Sarah Scoles
When: Nov. 8, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Recipients of the 2018 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing for excellence in publication will read from their works:
Catherine Chung MFA ‘06, Writer
Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL and studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before receiving her MFA from Cornell. She is the author of Forgotten Country, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Granta New Voice, and a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. Her new novel, The Tenth Muse, is forthcoming from Ecco in 2019.
Ezra Dan Feldman MFA ’08, PhD ‘17, Poet
Ezra Dan Feldman is the author of Habitat of Stones, which won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. He has published in RHINO, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, the Los Angeles Review, Gertrude, and other journals. He teaches English and Science and Technology Studies at Williams College.
Sara Eliza Johnson BA ‘06, Poet
Sara Eliza Johnson’s first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other honors. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and elsewhere.
Sarah Scoles MFA ‘10, Nonfiction Writer
Sarah Scoles is the author of the book Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. She is a contributing reporter at WIRED and a contributing editor at Popular Science, and her nonfiction work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, and others. Her fiction has been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Catapult, LIT, and other journals.
Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Spring 2018
Spring 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
Reading by Julie Sheehan
When: Feb. 1, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Julie Sheehan, Poet
Julie Sheehan is the author of three poetry collections: Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise; Orient Point; and Thaw. Honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award; NYFA Fellowship in Poetry; Robert H. Winner prize from Poetry Society of America; and, from Paris Review, the Bernard F. Conners prize. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review; and such anthologies as The Best American Poetry, 180 More, and Good Poems, American Places. She is on the core faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Stony Brook Southampton and is the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2018.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring J. Robert Lennon & Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
When: Feb. 8, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
J. Robert Lennon, Fiction Writer
J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, and his criticism in The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Poet
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. Currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, she has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective. She was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works for MoMA.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by Julie Schumacher
When: Mar. 15, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Julie Schumacher, Writer
Julie Schumacher (MFA Cornell 1986) is the author of nine books, including the national bestseller Dear Committee Members, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She is the only woman to have won the Thurber Prize. Schumacher’s first novel, The Body Is Water, was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her essays and short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle for Higher Education. Most recently, she is the author of Doodling for Academics – a Coloring and Activity Book, and of the forthcoming novel The Shakespeare Requirement. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
TRANS*forming Literature: a reading & conversation with Ryka Aoki, Helen Boyd, & Ely Shipley
When: Apr. 26, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ryka Aoki, Poet, Novelist, & Composer
Ryka Aoki is an author, composer, and teacher who was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” Ryka is a two-time Lambda Award finalist, and two of her compositions were adopted as “songs of peace” by the American Association of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors. Ryka has an MFA from Cornell University and is professor of English at Santa Monica College.
Helen Boyd, Writer & Educator
Helen Boyd is the author of My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married, books chronicling contemporary crossdressing culture, relational gender, and her own marriage to a trans woman. While she isn’t teaching, she consults on films, delivers lectures, and does training in gender diversity for corporate and community groups. Her blog (en)gender is at www.myhusbandbetty.com.
Ely Shipley, Poet
Ely Shipley is the author of Some Animal from Nightboat Books and Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips and the Thom Gunn Award. His writing appears in the Seneca Review, Crazyhorse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Diagram, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Other Spring 2018 Creative Writing Events
In A Word featuring Joanie Mackowski & Elisha Cohn, In Conversation
When: May. 2, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
In A Word is a series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of fiction writers and poets. In the spring, poet Joanie Mackowski will read and converse with scholar Elisha Cohn.
How can we write beyond the human? Though lyric poems are often assumed to express the perspective of a single human voice, or novels to focus on the story of an individual protagonist, what resources might writers have to imagine alternative perspectives? How can we speak from the vantage of animals, vapors, cells, corporate or collective persons? In this conversation, Joanie Mackowski and Elisha Cohn (Associate Professors of English) bring together creative and critical perspectives on ecological, scientific, social, and above all, aesthetic efforts to rethink the boundaries between selves as connections among bodies.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Reading
When: May. 12, 3:00 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Poets Cristina Correa, Emily Mercurio, Carl Moon, & Lindsey Warren, and fiction writers Neal Giannone, Peter Gilbert, Shakarean Hutchinson, Weena Pun, & Hema Surendranathan will share work from their theses or other works-in-progress.
Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Spring 2017
Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Alice Fulton and Helena María Viramontes
When: Feb. 9, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Alice Fulton, Poet and Writer
Alice Fulton's latest book of poems is Barely Composed; her most recent fiction collection is The Nightingales of Troy. Fulton’s honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry.
Helena María Viramontes, Writer
Helena María Viramontes is the author of Their Dogs Came with Them, a novel, and two previous works of fiction, The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus. Named a Ford Fellow in Literature, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, and a 2017 Bellagio Literary Arts Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. Professor Viramontes is at work on a new novel.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by Jeff VanderMeer
When: Mar. 16, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Jeff VanderMeer, Fiction Writer
NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer’s most recent novels, the Southern Reach trilogy, explore the limits of ecology and human understanding and have been translated into 35 languages. A movie based on his novel Annihilation, winner of the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, will be released by Paramount in 2017. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Black Clock, and many others, while his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. VanderMeer has spoken on both global warming issues and social media at MIT, Vanderbilt, the University of Florida, and many others. He is the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His novel Borne will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2017.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading featuring Eamon Grennan
When: Apr. 13, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Eamon Grennan, Poet
Eamon Grennan, a Dubliner, taught for many years at Vassar College. He has also taught in the Graduate Writing Programs of Columbia and NYU. Recent collections are Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems, and But the Body. His Still Life with Waterfall won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has translated the poems of Leopardi (winner of the PEN award in translation) and co-translated (with his partner, Rachel Kitzinger) Oedipus at Colonus. He has also written a book of critical essays: Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century. His latest volume is There Now. In the past few years he has been writing and directing “plays for voices” for a small Irish theatre group—Curlew Theatre Company. He lives in Poughkeepsie and in Connemara.
This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by Lisa Russ Spaar
When: Apr. 27, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Lisa Russ Spaar, Poet and Essayist
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of over ten books of poetry and criticism, most recently Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (2016) and Orexia: Poems (2017). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, IMAGE, Yale Review, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry series, and many other journals and anthologies. Her commentaries, reviews, and columns about poetry have appeared regularly in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing Program, and Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia.
Refreshments and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Fall 2016
Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series
James McConkey: Courting Memory
A 95th Birthday Celebration featuring James McConkey with Diane Ackerman, Gilbert Allen and A. Manette Ansay
When: Sep. 1, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
James McConkey, Fiction and Nonfiction Writer
James McConkey joined the Department of English as assistant professor in 1956. He wrote fiction until the early 1960s and retired in 1992 as Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus. Known for his meditative nonfiction narratives, McConkey is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Court of Memory, To a Distant Island and The Anatomy of Memory, as well as critical essays such as his study of E.M. Forster. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts essay award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature. McConkey’s most recent book, The Complete Court of Memory, includes narratives published in magazines but previously uncollected. In honor of McConkey, three of his award-winning former students will read from their own works.
Diane Ackerman ‘78, Poet and Essayist
Diane Ackerman is the author of twenty-four books, including the New York Times bestsellers A Natural History of the Senses, Orion Book Award winner (and movie),The Zookeeper’s Wife, and The Human Age, which received the PEN Thoreau Award. She’s a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Gilbert Allen ‘77, Poet and Fiction Writer
Gilbert Allen’s newest books are Catma and The Final Days of Great American Shopping. A member of the South Carolina Academy of Authors and the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from The Southern Review, he is the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature Emeritus at Furman University.
Manette Ansay ‘91, Fiction Writer and Memoirist
A. Manette Ansay is the author of a story collection, a memoir and six novels, including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection, and Midnight Champagne, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ansay is Professor of English at the University of Miami.
Reading by Joy Harjo
When: Sep. 15, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Joy Harjo, Poet and Memoirist
Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the United States Artist Fellowship. A renowned musician, Harjo performs solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning albums including Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She is Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading: H.G. Carrillo, Sally Wen Mao, Adam O’Fallon Price, and Emily Rosko
When: Sep. 29, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
H.G. Carrillo ‘07, Fiction Writer
H.G. Carrillo is the author of Loosing My Espanish, a novel (2005). His short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Slice, and other journals and publications. Carrillo sits on the executive board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and lives in the Washington, D.C. area, where he is currently at work on a novel.
Sally Wen Mao '12, Poet
Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf and the National University of Singapore. Her work is published in Poetry, A Public Space, Tin House and Best American Poetry 2013, among others. She is a 2016-2017 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Adam O'Fallon Price '14, Fiction Writer
Adam O’Fallon Price is the author of The Grand Tour, a novel. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Epoch, The Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, Glimmer Train, The Antioch Review and elsewhere. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Cornell University, where he earned an MFA in 2014.
Emily Rosko '03, Poet
Emily Rosko is the author of Prop Rockery (2012) and Raw Goods Inventory (2006). She is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line and poetry editor for Crazyhorse. She teaches at the College of Charleston.
Reading by David Madden
When: Oct. 13, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
David Madden, Fiction and Nonfiction Writer
David Madden has published extensively in all genres. Among his many novels are Bijou, Sharpshooter, The Suicide’s Wife, Abducted by Circumstance and London Bridge in Plague and Fire. His most recent book of short stories, The Last Bizarre Tale, was published in 2014, and his forthcoming collection of novellas, Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh, will appear this coming spring of 2017. Madden has also just finished a memoir, My Intellectual Life in the Army. Among his awards are a Rockefeller Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts prize, a National Council on the Arts Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Suicide’s Wife.
A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Madden studied at the Yale School of Drama. He has taught at Kenyon College, Ohio University, LSU and has been a visiting writer at numerous colleges, including UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as on the staff of writers’ conferences such as Bread Loaf. Robert Penn Warren Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emeritus at LSU, Madden now lives in Black Mountain, N.C. with his wife, Robbie, who is working for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Reading by Chris Abani
When: Nov. 3, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
Chris Abani, Poet and Writer
Chris Abani’s books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night: A Novella, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names For Red, Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot and Kalakuta Republic. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian and Serbian.