Thursday 22 March 2018 7:00PM
Shalala Student Center, Grand Ballroom East
Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, February 2018). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Silver Sparrow was named a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University, she is spending the 2017-18 academic year as the Shearing Fellow for Distinguished Writers at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés was born in New Jersey to Cuban parents. Her works appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Southern Humanities Review, Flash Fiction, Saw Palm, Literary Mama,Kweli Journal, Guernica, and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Her short story collections, Oye What I’m Gonna Tell You (2015) and Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles (2009), were #4 and #5 on theGuardian’s list of 10 of the best books to help understand Cuba. Everyday Chica, winner of the 2010 Longleaf Press Poetry Prize was followed by Everyday Chica, Music and More, a poetry CD. She teaches at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A Colgate University Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Fiction as well as a recipient of the University of Iowa's Provost's Postgraduate Fellowship in Fiction, Okparanta was nominated for a US Artists Fellowship in 2012. She is a winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award, a 2016 Lambda Literary Award, the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, and a 2014 O. Henry Prize.
Phillip B. Williams is the author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. Phillip was finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature and a Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. He received a 2017 Whiting Award, 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl. He is currently visiting professor in English at Bennington College.
Elda Rotor is Vice President and Publisher for Penguin Classics. She oversees the U.S. editorial program including the works of John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. She has created and edited several series including Penguin Civic Classics, Penguin Horror, Penguin Drop Caps, and the Penguin Orange Collection. In 2013, Ms. Rotor co-produced, edited and narrated Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, named one of the Best Apps of the Year by Apple. For Penguin Books, she edited the New York Times-bestselling The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution by Richard Beeman, The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson, and Not Quite Not White by Sharmila Sen. Previously, she worked at Oxford University Press. She received her BA from George Washington University. She is a member of the Advisory Board for Kundiman and the board of directors for The Academy of American Poets.
Gina Apostol is the author of four novels. The latest, Insurrecto, about a road trip into the heart of Duterte's Philippines, is also anthologized as "The Unintended" in A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance; Manila Noir; Go Home!; and Massachusetts Review. A work-in-progress, William McKinley's World, like Insurrecto, uses her research on the Balangiga massacre and the Philippine-American war to cast a lens on our contemporary times. Her third book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines.
Patrick Rosal is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and musician/composer/arranger. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Brooklyn Antediluvian, which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He has been a featured performer across four continents and at hundreds of venues and festivals throughout the United States. A recipient of residencies from Civitella Ranieri and the Lannan Foundation, he has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Core Researcher Program. He currently teaches at Princeton University as Visiting Associate Professor and is a full-time faculty member of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden.
