Lannan Center Podcast

On April 7th, 2026, the Lannan Center hosted a poetry reading and talk with Volha Hapeyeva and Valzhyna Mort. Hosted by Carolyn Forché.Volha Hapeyeva (b. in Minsk, Belarus) is a poet, writer, translator, doctor of linguistics, and artist. She writes in Belarusian and German and has received numerous prizes and awards for her work: Wortmeldungen Literature Preis-2022 (Germany), among others. Her poems have been translated into more than 15 languages. She is the author of 14 books in Belarusian and the English poetry book In My Garden of Mutants (2021, Arc Publication) was awarded the English PEN Translates Award. She was a 2019/2020 writer-in-residence in Graz, a fellow of the Writers-in-Exile Program of German PEN, and in 2022\2023 was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.Since 2019, she has lived in Austria and Germany.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 (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation.Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. She teaches at Cornell University.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 31, 2026, Acclaimed author Salman Rushdie joined former NPR host and Princeton visiting professor Razia Iqbal for a conversation about his extraordinary writing life, viewed through the lens of change Rushdie will discuss his latest work, The Eleventh Hour, a quintet of short stories published in November 2025, alongside reflections on his literary journey from early novels exploring postcolonial experience to his recent memoir Knife, which chronicles his recovery from the 2022 attack.Salman Rushdie is the author of 22 books, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, including Languages of Truth. His most recent book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. In 2007, he was awarded a Knighthood for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in 2022. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was awarded the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels and named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 26, 2026, Poet Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What’s Left Is Tender, joined radio host Georgina Godwin for an intimate conversation about his powerful exploration of disability, chronic pain, and family silence.Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his)is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. He received his B.A. in English with a minor in Classical Civilization from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012). He received both his M.A. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018) in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in health humanities, disability studies, and the history of medicine.Travis has contributed to numerous publications dedicated to accessible public scholarship like Synapsis, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He also regularly reviews collections of poetry for literary and arts journals like Up the Staircase Quarterly and Tupelo Quarterly.Travis has over a decade of teaching experience. He previously taught at BrainChild Education, a K-12 tutoring center in Oakland, CA. From 2010-2012, he also worked as a peer learning facilitator at UCLA’s Academics in the Commons/Athletics Peer Learning Labs, where he regularly held tutorials on composition and literature. He also served as an Adjunct Instructor in English for the Community College of Philadelphia and graduate student instructor for University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English and The College of Liberal and Professional Studies Program. He was formerly Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English at The University of Texas at Austin.Beyond teaching, Travis has worked as a Student Educator for the Armand Hammer Museum, where he developed and gave public tours of art exhibitions. In 2010, Travis worked internationally as an intern and guest English instructor at Ryugaku Journal, a Japanese publication catering to Japanese students interested in studying abroad in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.Alongside his academic and public writing, he is also a poet who writes often about embodiment at the intersections of queerness and disability. His poetry has been widely published and nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies. He is also the recipient of the Greater Columbus Art Council’s Artists Elevated Award in literature.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 24, 2026, Dominican-American poet, novelist and essayist, Julia Alvarez read from her latest poetry collection in conversation with radio host Georgina Godwin. The poems in Visitations reflect on change across the arc of decades—family, aging, love, the body, finding voice, and the very act of poetry itself.Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work was included in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS and in Spring 2026, she will publish Visitations, her first new collection of Alvarez’s poems in over twenty years. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  She lives in Vermont.

On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, the Lannan Center hosted a conversation between Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera and Carmen Lamas (Latinx Literary Culture Professor at the University of Virginia).Yuri Herrera is a writer born in Actopan, Hidalgo, México, and he writes in both Spanish and English. His first novel, Trabajos del reino (trans. Kingdom Cons), won the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven 2003 and received the “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008; his second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His third novel is La transmigración de los cuerpos (Transmigration of Bodies). The three novels have been translated into multiple languages and published in English.  In 2016, he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best Translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. In 2016, Rice University and Literal Publishing published Talud, a collection of his short stories. The same year, he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin for the body of his work. His latest books are the historical narrative A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, and the sci-fi short stories collection Diez planetas. He received his BA in Political Science at UNAM, MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught literary theory, creative writing, and Latin American literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico and at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte before coming to Tulane University, where he is an Associate Professor.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, January 20th, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and discussion by American fiction writer Jenny Offill, hosted by Lannan Visiting Chair Rabih Alameddine. Jenny Offill is an acclaimed American fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, the Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, November 18th, the Lannan Center hosted a special tribute evening honoring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, featuring writers Nukoma wa Ngugi, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and Helon Habila. Moderated by Lannan Visiting Lecturer Tope Folarin.Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) was an award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist from Kenya whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. Born in 1938, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986).Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 21st, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and discussion by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Fady Joudah is the author of […], a 2024 finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, September 30th, the Lannan Center hosted a book launch for Rabih Alameddine's The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), hosted by Tope Folarin, Lannan Visiting Lecturer.Rabih Alameddine is the Lannan Foundation's Visiting Chair and author of seven critically acclaimed novels, most recently The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award. He is also author of The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022; The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, April 8th, the Lannan Center hosted a reading by award-winning poet Roger Reeves, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Roger Reeves is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023) and Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal  Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships and a Whiting Award. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Thursday, March 27th, the Lannan Center welcomed actress and activist Susan Sarandon to begin the final night of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate", with a reading from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The reading was followed by a conversation with biologist Dr. Dino J. Martins, moderated by author Aminatta Forna. Dr. Dino J. Martins is internationally respected for his evolutionary biology and entomological research, biodiversity conservation work, and natural history writing, and he is widely known as one of Kenya’s leading biological scientists. Dr. Martins graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from Indiana University in 1999 and worked on his M.Sc. in Botany at the University of KwaZulu Natal in 2004. He earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2011 before joining TBI as a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University. Dr. Martins has taught in the TBI Origins field school every semester it has been offered since Spring 2011.Dr. Martins' research in the Turkana Basin has included the description of new species of bees, including some of the most ancient lineages of bees known and the discovery of genera previously not recorded from Africa. Dr. Martins is also a Co-PI of the Turkana Genome Project, which brings together dozens of international scientists to look at the complex interactions among human genes, the environment, and adaptation in a world that is increasingly mismatched between our biology and technology/culture. Dr. Martins is actively building links and collaborations globally to expand the scientific frontiers of research at TBI. This includes building on the excellent fundamental research around human origins and evolution, to other disciplines that intersect with the fields of evolution and ecology, climate change, and the future of sustainable human existence and development.Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Thursday, March 27th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning author and journalist Omar El Akkad for a conversation with New York Times contributor Aida Alami as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade, he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists.His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.His short story “Government Slots” was selected for the Best Canadian Stories 2020 anthology. His newest novel, What Strange Paradise, won the 2021 Giller Prize and the Pacific Northwest Book Award.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Wednesday, March 26th, the Lannan Center welcomed human rights and environmental justice activist Kumi Naidoo for a conversation with Climate Rights International Founder Brad Adams as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. At the age of fifteen, he organized school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa. His courageous actions made him a target for the Security Police, leading to his exile in the United Kingdom, where he remained until 1990. Upon his return to South Africa, Kumi played a pivotal role in the legalization of the African National Congress in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.Currently, Kumi serves as a Senior Advisor for the Community Arts Network (CAN). He holds the position of distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Additionally, he continues to represent global interests as a Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. He also holds positions as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College.Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences.Brad Adams was the Executive Director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch from 2002-2022. In this position, he oversaw investigations, advocacy, and media work in twenty countries, including China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Japan, and North Korea.He worked on issues such as attacks on environmental and human rights defenders, land rights, labor rights, the protection of civil society, freedom of expression, refugees, women’s rights, impunity, and international justice. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He has regularly appeared on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other major media.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, March 25th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning author Amitav Ghosh for a conversation with journalist Razia Iqbal as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. Gun Island was released in September 2019. Ghosh’s first-ever book in verse, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, was published in February 2021. His latest books, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, was released in October 2021, and Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories was released in February 2024.The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997, and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001. In January 2005, The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. They have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian (Penguin Random House India) and Incendiary Circumstances (Houghton Mifflin, USA). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 25th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning poet Dana Levin for a reading, hosted by Carolyn Forché. Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011, Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Banana Palace, published in 2016, was a finalist for the Rilke Prize.Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master (2023) for the Unsung Masters Series.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 4th, the Lannan Center welcomed renowned poet, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator Anne Carson for a reading, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Ontario, on June 21, 1950. She attended St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto and, despite leaving twice, received her BA in 1974, her MA in 1975 and her PhD in 1981. Since bursting onto the international poetry scene in 1987 with her long poem “Kinds of Water,” Carson has published numerous books of poetry, including Wrong Norma (New Directions, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award and long-listed for the National Books Critics Circle Award; Float (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Red Doc> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992).Also a Classics scholar, Carson is the translator of Electra (Oxford University Press, 2001), If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2002), and An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), among others. She is also the author of Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986).Her awards and honors include the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur Fellowship. She was also the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, January 21st, the Lannan Center presented a reading featuring poets Eduardo C. Corral and Tyree Daye, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University at St. Louis.Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 22nd, the Lannan Center presented an evening with award-winning author Aleksandar Hemon, hosted by Rabih Alameddine, Lannan Visiting Chair.Aleksandar Hemon is most recently the author of The World and All That It Holds (2023). He is also the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. His other works include two books of nonfiction, My Parents: An Introduction and The Book of My Lives, the novel The Making of Zombie Wars, journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 1st, the Lannan Center presented an evening with Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, hosted by Tope Folarin, Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer.Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan author from Colombo. He is the author of two novels: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010), which won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize, and the Gratiaen Prize, and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022), which won the Booker Prize. His works have been translated into 26 languages. Karunatilaka is also the author of several children’s books, dedicated and inspired by his own children.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, September 24th, the Lannan Center presented a reading by Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies, from his debut collection of poems Origin Myths (Shearsman, 2024).Duncan Wu began his career as a Fellow by Special Election at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy, in 1991. In 1995 he was appointed Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he became Professor of Romantic Studies in 1999. In 2000 he was appointed University Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Catherine's College.  In January 2008, he left Oxford and came to Georgetown as a Professor of English. He has authored or edited a number of books, principally in the areas of Romantic Studies and Contemporary British Drama. These include Romanticism: An Anthology (four editions, 1994, 1998, 2007, 2012); A Companion to Romanticism (1998); Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1815 (2 vols., 1993, 1995); Wordsworth: An Inner Life (2000); Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols., 1998); and Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Playwrights and Directors (2000). Over the years he has written for British newspapers, including The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, the TLS, and Times Higher Education. He is President of The Charles Lamb Society and former Vice-Chairman of The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, a founder member and former Chairman of The Hazlitt Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 21, 2024, renowned authors Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems) and Zeke Caligiuri (This is Where I Am) offered their thoughts on the intersection of literature and the prison system as they discussed the impact of incarceration in shaping their writing lives, creative processes and narratives. This event was cosponsored by the Prisons and Justice Initiative. Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show. Zeke Caligiuri is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press), finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is the co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. Caligiuri is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center. He is an editor and contributor to the anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023).Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 20, 2024, bestselling author and deaf rights’ activist Sara Nović talked about her writing life and novelTrue Biz, with the Washington Post‘s Amanda Morris. This event was coponsored by the Disability Cultural Center and ASL interpreted. Sara Nović is the author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz. Her other books are Girl at War, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and America is Immigrants. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.Amanda Morris is a disability reporter for The Washington Post who has trailblazed on this beat. Before joining The Post in 2022, she was the inaugural disability reporting fellow for the New York Times and previously covered science, politics and national news for outlets like the Arizona Republic, the Associated Press, and NPR. She uses her experiences as a hard of hearing woman with two deaf parents to inform her coverage.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 19, 2024 , acclaimed author Viet Thanh Nguyen discussed his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, and reflected on the TV adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer. With former Newshour host Razia Iqbal.Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (Corsair, 2016) is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (coming to HBO as a TV series directed by Park Chan-wook). His other books include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Committed. Nguyen 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.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 27, 2024, the Lannan Center presented a reading featuring Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov and Slovene poet Aleš Šteger.Nikola Madzirov is the author of Remnants of Another Age and Relocated Stone, which received the Hubert Burda European Poetry Award and the prestigious Miladinov Brothers Award. He was awarded the Studentski Zbor Award for Locked in the City and the Aco Karamanov prize for Somewhere Nowhere. Born into a family of Balkan Wars refugee in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, Madzirov has gone on to participate in many international literary festivals and events in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and he has received several international awards and fellowships.Aleš Šteger, born 1973 in Ptuj, lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, novels, and essays as well as several books for young adults. He also works as an editor, translator and initiator of artistic and cultural events. Six of his books have been published in English: The Book of Things (BOA Editions, US, 2010), which won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award and the 2011 Best Literary Translation into English Award from AATSEEL; the collection of lyric essays, Berlin (Counterpath, US, 2015); the book of prose poems, Essential Baggage (Equipage, 2016); the novel Absolution (Istros Books, 2017); Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (White Pine Press, US, 2019); and The Book of Bodies (White Pine Press, US, 2022). His retrospective, Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2022.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 6, 2024, the Lannan Center presented a reading by poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Saddiq Dzukogi, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, and Tolu Oloruntoba.Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection Quiet was published by Faber in 2022 and was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023 in the Poetry category. Quiet was also shortlisted for the T.S. Elliot Prize and the Pollard Poetry Prize.Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2022 Julie Suk Award.Henneh Kyereh Kwaku is a poet of Bono heritage and the author of Revolution of the Scavengers (African Poetry Book Fund / Akashic Books, 2020). A 2022 resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, and a recipient of the 2020 Samira Bawumia Literature Prize, he is originally from Gonasua in the Jaman South Municipality (Bono Region) of Ghana.Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of Each One a Furnace (Penguin Randomhouse, 2022) and The Junta of Happenstance (Anstruther, 2021), winner of the 20222 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Oloruntoba spent his early career as a primary care physician and currently manages virtual health projects.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, November 7, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a special reading featuring poets Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky, Lyudmyla Khersonska, and Boris Kershonsky. Moderated by Askold Melnyczuk.Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is University Professor at Georgetown and the author of five books of poetry, including In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin, 2020).Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a New York Times’ Notable Book and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo, 2004).Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian, including Today is A Different War (Arrowsmith Press).Widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets, Boris Khersonsky is author of seventeen collections of poetry and essays in Russian, and most recently, in Ukrainian.Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, Askold Melnyczuk, is an award-winning translator and author, most recently of the book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow (2021).Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 17, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a reading by writer and Lannan Visiting Chair, Rabih Alameddine. Introduction by Deborah Tannen, Distinguished University Professor.Rabih Alameddine is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, most recently The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022. He is also the author of The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and recently, a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Alameddine is currently the Lannan Foundation Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 3, 2023 the Lannan Center presented a reading and conversation featuring writer Leila Aboulela and moderated by Tope Folarin, Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer. Introduction by Rabih Alameddine, Lannan Visiting Chair.Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese writer whose work has received critical recognition and a high profile for its depiction of the interior lives of Muslim women and its distinctive exploration of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality. She is the author of six novels: River Spirit, Bird Summons, Minaret, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, The Kindness of Enemies and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her latest story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize, (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Leila grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Aberdeen.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, September 19, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a reading by poet Arthur Sze. Introduction by Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies.Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award, and The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021). His other books include Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On April 11, 2023, The Lannan Center hosted a reading and talk featuring poets Camille T. Dungy and Major Jackson.Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.Major Jackson is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems; The Absurd Man; Roll Deep; Holding Company; Hoops; and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry. He served as guest editor of Best American Poetry in 2019. Jackson is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On February 28, 2023, The Lannan Center hosted a reading and talk featuring poets Kazim Ali and Fanny Howe.Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.Fanny Howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Love and I (2019), The Needle’s Eye (2016), Second Childhood (2014), Come and See (2011), On the Ground (2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. A creative writing teacher of note, Howe has lectured at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

A Conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Author of Big Girl) and Artist Baseera Khan, moderated by Prof. Nadia Brown.If a body could speak, what would it say? The way our bodies are viewed and categorized is not always within our power. A writer and a visual artist reflect upon representing, in words and images, the experiences which come with existing in bodies: black, brown, queer, female, Muslim, big – defined by systems of power beyond our control.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

 A Discussion with NPR’s Diane Rehm and Dr. Ewan GoligherFollowed by a Panel Discussion with Dr. Lydia Dugdale (Columbia University), Dr. Ewan Goligher (University of Toronto), Diane Rehm (NPR), and Dr. Katalin Roth (George Washington University), moderated by journalist John Donvan. Should we be able to choose how and when we die? And what are the real-life consequences of laws that allow for medical assistance in dying? An international panel of physicians, writers, and ethicists set the stage for a discussion of philosophical, practical, theological, and personal implications of medical assistance in dying. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

 A Panel Discussion with Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History), Meghan O’Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom), and Dr. Daniel Marchalik, moderated by Tope Folarin. More than just a sickness, pandemics are the place where illness meets politics. Today we live in the aftermath of two great pandemics, the AIDS pandemic of the 1980’s and the COVID-19 pandemic. How has our society and how have we been changed by those events? What is the role of the writer as activist or custodian of memory in the story of the aftermath?Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

A Conversation with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, January 24th, 2023, The Lannan Center hosted a reading and conversation with poet Patricia Smith,Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1998), Big Towns Big Talk (Zoland Books, 2002), Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991);  the children’s book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low, 2013), and the history Africans in America (Mariner, 1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012). She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Smith is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor at Princeton University and an instructor in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, November 15, 2022, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and conversation with writer Laila Lalami and moderated by Aminatta Forna. Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of five books, most recently, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, which was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her other books include, The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On November 1, 2022 the Lannan Center hosted a reading and talk featuring writer Chen Chen and moderated by Carolyn Forché. Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 4, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring writer Seán Hewit. Hosted by Professor Cóilín Parsons, Director of Global Irish Studies.Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. His debut collection, Tongues of Fire, is published by Jonathan Cape. He is a book critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His debut collection, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30”  artists in Ireland. He is also the winner of a Northern Writers’ Award, the Resurgence Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. His book J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism is published with Oxford University Press (2021). His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022).Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Wednesday, September 14, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a special evening featuring Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. Hosted by Lannan Center Director Aminatta Forna. Introduction by Lahra Smith, Director of the African Studies Program.Abdulrazak Gurnah is the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most recent novel, AFTERLIVES is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in August 2022. He is the author of nine previous novels, including Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award), and Desertion. Born and raised in Zanzibar, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent; he lives in Canterbury, England.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, April 12, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets Victoria Chang and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Hosted by Carolyn Forché. Introductions by Lannan Fellows Max Zhang and Hiruni Herat.  About Victoria ChangVictoria Chang’s new book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything is forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press and Corsair Books in the U.K.). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her most recent poetry book, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a Core Faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program.About Rachel Eliza GriffithsRachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. Her hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton), was published in 2020. Other poetry collections by Griffiths include Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015), The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011), Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011), and Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010). Griffiths is a recipient of fellowships including Cave Canem, Kimbilio, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her forthcoming debut novel, Promise, will be published by Random House.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

AboutThe United States: exceptional, individual, shining city on the hill, home of democracy, land of the free, of the “American Dream” and the pursuit of happiness. A national narrative is composed of ideas made into stories. And these stories are powerful. In a time of division can Americans agree on a common story or make space for multiple narratives?Panelists: Rabih Alameddine, Aleksandar Hemon, Fathali Moghaddam, and Patricia Smith. Chaired by John FreemanMusic: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

AboutAs the calls for social and racial justice grow, could the United States follow the example of South Africa and other conflict-affected nations and engage in a national, formal reconciliation process?Panelists: Elham Atashi, Tope Folarin, Aleksandar Hemon, and Tim Phillips. Chaired by David SmithMusic: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

AboutWage inequality in the United States is approaching the extreme level that prevailed prior to the Great Depression, creating new social classes: the precariat (those on short term or zero hours contracts without benefits) and the one percent. With disparity widening––and anger building among some of the dispossessed––can the American Dream endure?Panelists: Sarah Anderson, Amy Goldstein, and John Freeman. Chaired by Tope FolarinMusic: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

AboutWe write to make sense of the world around us. From war and political violence to natural disasters and pandemics – how have writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction responded to crises in their nation’s history? Panelists: Rabih Alameddine, Aleksandar Hemon, and Patricia Smith; Chaired by Jacki LydenMusic: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

AboutIf the lion does not tell his story, the hunter will. The history of the United States, as it is currently taught, is being contested like never before. Is it possible to reconcile differing perspectives on America’s national narrative?Panelists: Mark Muller, Elizabeth Rule, and Clint Smith; Chaired by Adam Rothman.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

Keynote Speech by Melody C. Barnes: "In Search of an Inclusive America: Culture, Politics, and the Narratives That Define Us" on March 22, 2022.About Melody C. BarnesMelody Barnes is executive director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. She is also the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Karsh Center for Law & Democracy.Ms. Barnes was Assistant to the President and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Administration of President Barack Obama. Prior to her tenure in the Obama Administration, she was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barnes is narrator and host of the podcast, LBJ and the Great Society and co-editor of Community Wealth Building & The Reconstruction of American Democracy.  Ms. Barnes earned her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she graduated with honors in history and her J.D. from the University of Michigan.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

Clips taken from past event The View From Abroad: “What Can America Learn from the Experience of Other Nations at a Time of Crisis?” held on Crowdcast on March 18, 2021.Music: Soundside (royalty free music) — "Violin Inspiration" — Provided by Jamendo.

Clips taken from past event "Is There Such a Thing as American Exceptionalism?” held at Beyond Borders Scotland on August 29, 2021.Music: AudioInfinity — "Inspirational Piano" — Provided by Jamendo.

On February 8th, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets Mark Nowak. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.About Mark NowakMark Nowak is the author of four poetry collections: Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020), Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Revenants (2000). Also a playwright, essayist, social critic, and labor activist, Nowak’s writing documents the hardships and injustices faced by the global working class. Nowak is the recipient of the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at St. Catherine University and Washington College, where he also worked as director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House. He has also led poetry workshops for workers and trade unions in Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., and South Africa. He is currently Professor of English at Manhattanville College and the founding director, in collaboration with PEN America, of the Worker Writers School.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.