The New York University Creative Writing Program’s Fall 2023 Reading Series launches in September with events featuring Garth Greenwell (Sept. 8), Jericho Brown (Sept. 20), Raven Leilani (Sept. 22), and Dana Spiotta (Sept. 29 ), among others. A new partnership with McNally Jackson launches this season with readings by NYU faculty and alumni at McNally Jackson stores (Sept. 19 and Sept. 20).
All events, unless otherwise noted, are held in the program’s Greenwich Village home, the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, located at 58 W. 10th Street (between 5th and 6th Aves.), and are free and open to the public. An RSVP is required (see links below) and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call 212.998.8816 or visit the program's website.
Friday, September 8, 5 p.m.
Fiction Reading: Garth Greenwell
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Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming from FSG in 2024. Greenwell is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at NYU.
Thursday, September 14, 7 p.m.
Poetry Reading: Dean Rader and Nicole Sealey
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Dean Rader has authored or co-authored 12 books, including Works and Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly was published in April from Copper Canyon Press. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report (Penguin Random House, 2023) and Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Sealey’s chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.
Tuesday, September 19, 7 p.m.
Poetry Launch Reading: Elisa Gonzalez
Note Location: McNally Jackson Seaport, 4 Fulton Street
Co-sponsored with McNally Jackson
RSVP required
Elisa Gonzalez, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, is the author of Grand Tour. Her poetry and prose have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Drift, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Wednesday, September 20, 7 p.m.
An Evening of Love Poems: Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, and Deborah Landau
Note Location: McNally Jackson Soho, 134 Prince Street
Co-sponsored with McNally Jackson
RSVP required
Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry, including Love and Other Poems, Together and by Ourselves, and Begging for It, and the chapbook American Boys. His poems have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He teaches at NYU and writes the endless poem “Love” on Twitter, one tweet a day.
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (2023). Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Yale Review, and the New York Times, and anthologized in The Best American Erotic Poems and The Best American Poetry. Landau is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
Thursday, September 21, 7 p.m.
Fiction and Poetry Alumni Reading: Elisa Gonzalez, Maggie Millner, Ben Purkert and Cleo Qian
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Elisa Gonzalez, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, is the author of Grand Tour. Her poetry and prose have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Drift, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets. Her poems have appeared in theNew Yorker, the Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, the Nation, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at the Yale Review.
Ben Purkert is the author of the poetry collection For the Love of Endings. His work appears in the New Yorker, the Nation, and the Kenyon Review, among others. He is the founder of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard and New York University, and he currently teaches at Rutgers. The Men Can’t Be Saved is his debut novel.
Cleo Qian is a fiction writer and poet who received her MFA from NYU. Qian’s work has appeared in over 20 outlets and she was a winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition. Her debut short story collection, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO, is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023.
Friday, September 22, 5 p.m.
A Celebration of the Axinn Foundation Fellowships
Co-sponsored with NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science
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Amir Ahmadi Arian has published several works of fiction and nonfiction in Persian. In English, his short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. His first novel in English, Then the Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperCollins in 2020. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University, New York.
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent whose debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, 2022), was winner of the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, winner of a 2023 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a “Good Morning America” Anticipated Book, an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick, and a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize. Called “one of 2020's buzziest poets” by Marie Claire, Hafizah is also the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American from Wesleyan University Press ( 2020). Hafizah holds a BA in English and economics from Clemson University; an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago; and an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow in Creative Narrative Nonfiction.
Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, the Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, the Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.
Jasmin Sandelson is the author of My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood (University of California Press). Her work also appears in the Georgia Review, Longreads, Hobart, and elsewhere.
Thursday, September 28, 7 p.m.
Reading: BOMB Magazine
A reading and conversation by contributors to the fall issue of BOMB Magazine hosted by Senior Editor Benjamin Samuel
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Benjamin Samuel has worked in the non-profit and independent literary community for over 10 years. Previously, he was the managing editor of Restless Books, the director of programs of the National Book Foundation, and an editor at Electric Literature, where he co-founded Recommended Reading. Samuel also teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia University and serves on committees for the National Book Foundation and the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Friday, September 29, 5 p.m.
The New Salon: Kate Doyle and Dana Spiotta in Conversation with Darin Strauss
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Kate Doyle is an American writer whose debut story collection I Meant It Once was printed by Algonquin Books in the US (July, 2023) and Corsair in the UK (September, 2023). Doyle is a former bookseller and a 2021 A Public Space Writing Fellow. Her work has appeared in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Split Lip, Wigleaf, ANMLY, and elsewhere.
Dana Spiotta is the author of five novels: Wayward, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year; Innocents and Others (2016), winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Eat the Document (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Foundation Award; and Lightning Field (2001), a New York Times Notable Book. Her other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Premio Pivano, a Creative Capital Award, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than it Hurts You, the memoir Half a Life, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020). Strauss is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes. His books have been named New York Times Notable Books, Entertainment Weekly Must Books of the Year, and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others. He teaches at New York University.
Subways: F, L, M (14th Street/6th Avenue); 1 (Christopher Street); A, B, C, D, E, F, M (West 4th Street).
