Events

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an American essayist whose work has appeared in GQ,The Paris Review,The Believer, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” an early essay on comedian Dave Chappelle, was a National Magazine Award finalist and has been called a classic. In 2017, her essay on James Baldwin was selected for The Best American Essays, and this year, “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof,” won the National Magazine Award for Best Feature Writing and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Ghansah’s first book, The Explainers & the Explorers, is due out later this year. . Sponsored by the Block Foundation. 

Chinelo Okparanta is the author of a story collection, Happiness Like Water, and a novel, Under the Udala Trees. In 2017, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Okparanta has received a Lambda Literary Award and an O. Henry Prize, and she was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction and has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and AGNI. She is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bucknell University.

Winner of this year's Brown Award. 

Bhanu Kapil is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: a Space for Monsters, humanimal [a project for future children], andSchizophrene, and the experimental prose work Ban en Banlieue. She also maintains a blog with a global following, the Vortex of Formidable Sparkles. She teaches and mentors undergraduates as part of a new appointment in interdisciplinary studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Jackie Wang is the author of a number of punk zines, including On Being Hard Femme; the poetry collections The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb; and a collection of essays, Carceral Capitalism. A writer, filmmaker, performer, and prison abolitionist, she is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University. 

A reading by the Pulitzer Prize-winner and current U. S. Poet Laureate

Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School, which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Poetry, as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Barack Obama’s May 2009 evening of poetry, music, and spoken word at the White House. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.