By Judith Schwartzstein, Vice President of Publicity, Sarah Lawrence College

Jun. 15, 2016:  Sarah Lawrence College will present a week of readings by acclaimed poets and writers beginning Sunday, June 19, and running through Friday, June 24. The readings, which pair a prose writer with a poet, are free and open to the public. All readings take place in the Donnelley Theatre in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center on the campus of the college.  

For further information, please call 914-395 2412 or go to https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/news-events/events/?filter-category=mfa-writing.

The schedule is as follows: 

Sunday, June 19

7:30 pm 
David Hollander (fiction writer) and Robyn Schiff (poet)

David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in dozens of print and online forums, including McSweeney’s, Agni, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, Unsaid, and The Collagist. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, notably in Best American Fantasy. He is a member of the Sarah Lawrence College writing faculty.

Robyn Schiff is the author of the poetry collections A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016), Revolver (2008), and Worth (2002). Her work has been represented in several anthologies, including Please Excuse this Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Penguin, 2015), and published widely in journals and magazines, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, and A Public Space. She is a co-editor at Canarium Books and currently teaches poetry at The University of Iowa.

Monday, June 20

1:00 pm
Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg (fiction writer) is the author of the novel City on Fire. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and The Millions. A novella A Field Guide to the North American Family was published in 2007. He is a member of the faculty of the Sarah Lawrence College graduate program in writing.

Monday, June 20

7:30 pm
Sam Lipsyte (fiction writer) and Thomas Lux (poet)

Sam Lipsyte is the author of five books, including The Fun Parts (Picador), The Ask, Home Land, The Subject Steve, and Venus Overdrive. He won the first annual Believer Book Award and was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Thomas Lux is the author of Selected Poems 1982-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2014). Formerly a member of the Sarah Lawrence College writing faculty, he teaches at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Bourne Professor of Poetry. He has a new book coming out in 2016 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, To The Left of Time. He is editing Bill Knott’s Selected Poetry for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, also coming out in 2016.

Tuesday, June 21

7:30 pm
Melissa Febos (nonfiction writer) and Matt Rasmussen (poet)

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010) and the forthcoming essay collection Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers, and she is the recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The MacDowell Colony. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University and teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College.

Matt Rasmussen is the author of Black Aperture (2013), which won a Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a National Book Award finalist. His honors and awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Loft Literary Center, the Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, and the McKnight Foundation. He is a founding member of the poetry press Birds, LLC. Rasmussen teaches at his alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College.

Wednesday, June 22

7:30 pm
Mark Jude Poirier (fiction writer) and Rickey Laurentiis (poet)

Mark Jude Poirier is the author of the novel Goats and the story collection Unsung Heroes of American Industry, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His other books include Naked Pueblo: Stories, Modern Ranch Living, a novel, and Intro to Alien Invasion, a graphic novel he co-wrote with Owen King. His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, BOMB, Conjunctions, Subtropics, The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. His produced screenplays have played at Sundance, The Toronto International Film Festival, the American Film Festival of Deauville, and at MOMA. He teaches at Harvard University as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and named one of the best poetry books of 2015 by Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, and Poets & Writers magazine, among others. His honors include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy.

Thursday, June 23

7:30 pm
Naomi Jackson (fiction writer) and Jeffrey McDaniel (poet)

Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of residencies from the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and the Camargo Foundation.

Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). His other books include The Endarkenment, The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, and Alibi School. He has received an NEA fellowship for creative writing and been published in many journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Field, American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry 1994 and 2010. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Friday, June 24

7:30 pm
Nami Mun  (fiction writer) and Yusef Komunyakaa (poet)

Nami Mun’s first book, Miles from Nowhere, received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library' 21st-Century Award, and The Hopwood Award, and it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. She has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. She has garnered fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing in Chicago.

Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of Neon Vernacular, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Kingsley Tufts award. His recent works include Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). He teaches at New York University.

Pictured here:  An entrance to Sarah Lawrence College.

Photo by N. Bower