This event will feature a reading by Nadifa Mohamed and conversation with CWP faculty member Darin Strauss. An audience Q&A will follow. A Distinguished Writer in Residence at the NYU Creative Writing Program for spring 2022, Nadifa Mohamed is the author of the novels Black Mamba Boy (2010), The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), and, most recently, The Fortune Men (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she has received both The Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, as well as numerous other prize nominations for her fiction. She contributes regularly to the Guardian and the BBC and is a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This is the first event of the NYU Emerging Writers Reading Series for spring 2022, coordinated by our graduate students. Each reading will feature four MFA students (from a mix of genres) reading alongside an established author. Edgar Gomez (he/she/they) is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, his words have appeared in Poets & Writers, Narratively, Catapult, Lithub, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, and elsewhere online and in print. His debut memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times. He lives in Jackson Heights, New York, where he is saving up for good lotion.

This event will feature readings by Joshua Ferris and Brandon Taylor and a conversation with both authors, moderated by Darin Strauss. Audience Q&A to follow. Joshua Ferris is the author of four novels, including Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and the most recent A Calling For Charlie Barnes (Little,  Brown & Co, 2021), which was named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a collection of stories, The Dinner Party. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers in 2010. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York. Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the short story collection Filthy Animals. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.

This is the second event of the NYU Emerging Writers Reading Series for spring 2022, coordinated by our graduate students. This reading will feature Bud Smith alongside graduate students Michael Barron, Namkyu Oh, Chris Whitehead, and Anna Zagerson. Bud Smith works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (forthcoming from Vintage in spring of ’22), Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017), among others. His fiction has been published in The Paris Review, The Believer, The Baffler, and The Nervous Breakdown, and more.

This event will feature a reading by Kate Zambreno and conversation with CWP faculty host Hari Kunzru. An audience Q&A will follow. Kate Zambreno’s most recent book is the novel Drifts (Riverhead Books, 2020), which Publisher’s Weekly called “immersive and exciting.” It was named a most anticipated book by Entertainment Weekly, Refinery 29, Esquire, LitHub, Salon, The Millions, and Dazed. Her next book, To Write as if Already Dead, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in June 2021. Brian Blanchfield has praised it as “Zambreno’s most urgent and charged work since Heroines.” Her other books include Screen Tests (Harper Perennial, 2019), a collection of shorts and essays, that was named a best book of the year by the editors of the Paris Review, Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and was reviewed in The Baffler, the New Yorker, Art in America, Frieze, and The New Republic,. Other nonfiction works include Appendix Project (Semiotext(e), 2019) a series of talks on grief, art and the project of literature that was written as a shadow project to her book on grief and the mother, Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e), 2017), given at Duke, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and at Washington University as the first Hurst Artist as Critic. 2019. Other novels include O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial, 2017), and Green Girl (Harper Perennial, 2014). Forthcoming is a monograph on Hervé Guibert for Columbia University Press. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. Zambreno also writes regularly for art catalogs and her work has been widely anthologized. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and holds a Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn.

This event will feature a reading by Meghan O'Rourke and a conversation with Katie Kitamura. A brief audience Q&A will follow. Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches.

This is the third and final event of the NYU Emerging Writers Reading Series for spring 2022, coordinated by our graduate students. Each reading will feature four NY MFA students (from a mix of genres) reading alongside an established author. Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. He teaches at Stanford University.

This event will feature readings by Omer Friedlander and Leigh Newman and a conversation with both authors, moderated by Darin Strauss. Audience Q&A to follow. Omer Friedlander is the author of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land. He was born in Jerusalem in 1994 and grew up in Tel Aviv. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. His short stories have won numerous awards, and have been published in the United States, Canada, France, and Israel. A Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University, he has earned a Bread Loaf Work-Study Scholarship as well as a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. He currently lives in New York City. Leigh Newman is the author of Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories and Still Points North, a memoir about growing up in Alaska which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and Electric Literature. In 2020, she was awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, a Pushcart Prize, and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ Fiction Prize for her work in The Paris Review.

The final event scheduled to accompany Professor Claudia Rankine’s graduate class on “American Poetry Movements,” this event will feature a conversation between Charles Bernstein and Lyn Heijinian, moderated by Claudia Rankine. Audience Q&A to follow.

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded 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. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Spring students read their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.