Cara Blue Adams

Date/time: Tuesday 18 October 2022, 4pm
Location: Mead Hall

Cara Blue Adams  is the author of the short story collection You Never Get it Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize, judged by Brandon Taylor.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: Cara Blue Adams

Authors on Reproductive Freedom

Shelly Oria  is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, Writings from the MeToo Movement (McSweeney’s 2019), as well as the forthcoming I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney’s 2022). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, received a number of awards, and been translated to several languages.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a writer, storyteller, and educator. A former fellow at the Center for Fiction, her work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, Kenyon Review, n+1, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The Nation, The American Prospect, Salon, and Mother Jones. Onnesha has read and performed on stages for The Moth, Tedx, Lincoln Center, and more. She is the author of The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.

Kate Tarker is an American playwright who grew up in Germany. Her newest play, Montag, is premiering at Soho Rep in Fall 2022. Other plays include THUNDERBODIES (Soho Rep), Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man (The Wilma, FoolsFURY), and Laura and the Sea (Rivendell Theatre Ensemble). Kate is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship, a MacDowell fellowship, The Vineyard’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, and Theater Masters’ Visionary Playwright Award, and she has been featured twice on the Kilroys List. She holds an MFA from Yale.

(Sponsored by the English Department, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: W@D_Authors on reproductive freedom_Sept22
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here.

A reading by Drew’s Creative Writing faculty (March 2022)
Emily Nemens debut novel, The Cactus League was called “a wonderful, necessary read to remind you how infinite and wild other people can be” (The Brooklyn Rail). It was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of the best books of the year by NPR. Her fiction has also appeared in Gettysburg Review, n+1, Iowa Review.

SaraMartin holds a MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been published by The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Adroit Journal, The Seattle Review, Penn Review, Columbia Journal and other publications. Sara recently completed a novel in verse called They Wake Up Swinging and is at work on a new project called Mocktails.

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award, and the story collection Cool for America, which was longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and fiction have appeared regularly in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Paris Review, and less regularly in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: Creative Writing Faculty Reading 2022

Publishing Symposium (Feb 2022)
Jenna Johnson, Editor in Chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has published a range of award-winning and bestselling titles, including Luster by Raven Leilani, Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght, Severance by Ling Ma, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, We the Animals by Justin Torres and James Beard Winner Save the Deli by David Sax. Jenna publishes fiction and narrative nonfiction, with particular interest in original and surprising voices.

Rebecca Gradinger joined the literary agency Fletcher & Company in 2009. She represents a variety of authors who write narrative nonfiction and literary fiction, including Maggie Shipstead, Francisco Cantú, Damon Tweedy, Courtney Maum, Noe Alvarez, Rachel Cargle, and others. She holds a BA from Barnard College and a JD from the George Washington University Law Center.

Denne Michele Norris is the Editor in Chief of Electric Literature. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and is hard at work on her debut novel.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: 2022 Publishing Symposium

Tiphanie Yanique (November 2021)
Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. Her poetry collection, Wife, won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the UK’s Forward/Felix Dennis Prize. Her novel, Land of Love and Drowning, won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from The Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014. She’s also the author of the short story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, and the Best American Short Stories. Her latest novel, Monster in the Middle, published in October 2021. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands. She lives now with her family in Atlanta, where she is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.
Event flier: click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Javier Zamora (October 2021)
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and has been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Stanford University. Unaccompanied is his first collection. He lives in Harlem where he’s working on a memoir.
Event flier: click here
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Lisa Taddeo (September, 2021)
Lisa Taddeo is an author, journalist and two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Her first nonfiction book, Three Women, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and is currently in pre-production as a series at Showtime with Shailene Woodley starring and Taddeo adapting and serving as executive producer. Animal, a national and international bestseller, is her debut novel.
Co-sponsored by Drew’s Women’s and Gender Studies program.
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil (April 2021)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of World of Wonder: in Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and recently named the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. She is also the author of four books of poetry, and is poetry editor of SIERRA, the national magazine of the Sierra Club. Awards for her writing include a fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and twice in Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
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Publishing Symposium (April 2021)
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, MacDowell, and Yaddo, she serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. Her fiction and nonfiction has been featured in Harper’s, New York Magazine, and others, and she is the author of the 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Callie Garnett, Senior Editor, joined Bloomsbury Publishing’s New York office in 2014 after completing a Masters in English at the University of Iowa. The books she has edited include Rachel Louise Snyder’s award-winning No Visible Bruises, T Kira Madden’s immensely beloved and critically acclaimed Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and Anna North’s instant New York Times bestseller Outlawed (Reese Witherspoon’s January 2021 Book Club Pick). She acquires issue-driven narrative nonfiction, literary fiction and memoir, and cultural commentary. She is also a poet—her first full length collection, Wings in Time, comes out from The Song Cave this September.
(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).
Event flyer: Click here

Courtney Zoffness (March 2021)
Courtney Zoffness writes fiction and nonfiction. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction, as well as a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship, the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Guernica, Longreads, and elsewhere. Her debut, Spilt Milk, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly, LitHub, The Millions, Refinery29, and others. Courtney directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here and here

Emma Cline (February 2021)
Emma Cline is author of The Girls, an international bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her short story collection, Daddy, published in 2020. The recipient of the prestigious Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review, Cline’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Tin House, and elsewhere, and her fiction has been anthologized several times in Best American Short Stories. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Event flyer: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Jamel Brinkley – November 2020
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories.
He was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York, he currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Photo credit: Arash Saedinia.
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Mark Olshaker – April 2020
Mark Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of twelve nonfiction books and five novels, including Einstein’s Brain and The Edge. His books with former FBI Special Agent and criminal profiling pioneer John Douglas, beginning with Mindhunter, have sold millions of copies and have been translated into many languages. Mindhunter is now a dramatic series on Netflix, directed by David Fincher. Their most recent books are The Killer Across the Table, which takes a deep dive into the process of interviewing serial killers in prison, which formed the basis for behavioral profiling; and The Killer’s Shadow, which relates the FBI’s hunt for Joseph Paul Franklin, the nation’s first racist and anti-Semitic serial killer.
Olshaker also has extensive experience with the other field of life-and-death detective work: medical mystery. His first novel was the critically acclaimed Einstein’s Brain, and his research with the Centers for Disease Control led to his novel Unnatural Causes and the nonfiction book Virus Hunter with Dr. C.J. Peters, CDC’s Chief of Special Pathogens. The New England Journal of Medicine compared it to Paul de Kruif’s classic Microbe Hunters. Olshaker’s book with epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, was named the Number 1 Global Health Book of the Year by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2017.
Olshaker is past president of the Norman Mailer Society, a director of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, life member of the Writers Guild of America and former chairman of the Cosmos Club Foundation. He and his wife Carolyn, an attorney, live in Washington, D.C.
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Mira Jacob – February 2020
Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.
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Publishing Symposium – November 2019

Andrew Martin, Cultural critic and author, Onnesha Roychoudhuri – Journalist and author, Eve Sanoussi C’14 – Associate editor – W.W. Norton

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund)
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Writers Respond to #MeToo panel – October 2019

Assistant Professor Courtney Zoffness moderated a discussion with four authors, Shelly Oria, Samantha Hunt, Syreeta McFadden, and Hossannah Asuncion, all of whose work appears in McSweeney’s forthcoming multi-genre anthology Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement.
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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Student Prizewinners Reading – April 2019

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Mitchell S. Jackson – March 2019

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years, won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The PEN/Hemingway Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He is also the author of the forthcoming memoir Survival Math (Scribner), where his family and friends reflect larger cultural issues, including race, prison and drug addiction. His honors include a Whiting Award, and fellowships from TED and the Lannan Foundation, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He teaches at NYU.
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Erika L. Sánchez – March 2019

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I am not your perfect Mexican Daughter, published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, is a New York Times Bestseller and was a National Book Awards finalist. She received a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship and a 2019 NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing.
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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Drew Creative Writing Faculty Reading – January 2019

Drew Creative Writing Faculty Reading featuring Hannah Beresford, Andrea Chapin, and Courtney Zoffness
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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is the author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the National Book Critics Award. Her other books include The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the short fiction collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her award-winning nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.  Her newest novel, Manhattan Beach, was published in October 2017 and was a New York Times bestseller. Egan is the newly-appointed president of the PEN American Center. She lives in Brooklyn.

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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Nicole Sealey and John Murillo – March 2018

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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Junot Diaz – January 2018

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.

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Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is the New York Times bestselling author of Another Brooklyn, which was a 2016 finalist for the National Book Award.  Her 2014 bestseller, Brown Girl Dreamin, won the National Book Award and was the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, the NAACP Image Award and the Sibert Honor Award. Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate (2015-2017) by the Poetry Foundation.  She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.

Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of the novels The Flame Alphabet and Notable American Women, and the short story collections The Age of Wire and String and Leaving the Sea. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. Ben is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Columbia University.

Michael Patrick MacDonald

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie and the acclaimed Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. He has received an American Book Award, A New England Literary Lights Award, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, and he’s a Senior Contributing Editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. He is the Author-in-Residence at Northeastern University’s Honors Department.

Cam Terwilliger

Cam Terwilliger’s writing can be found online in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Narrative, where he was named one of Narrative’s “15 Under 30.” In print, his writing appears in West Branch, Post Road, and Gettysburg Review, among others. His work has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Program, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Before coming to Drew, he taught previously at Emerson College, Louisiana State University, and Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Courtney Zoffness

Courtney Zoffness won the 2016 American Literary Review Prize in Fiction and the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from the Center for Fiction and the MacDowell Colony, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her fiction and literary nonfiction have appeared recently in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, and elsewhere. She has taught at nearly a dozen institutions, including Yale University and the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she was a writer-in-residence. Currently she co-directs the creative writing program at Drew, where she’s a Visiting Assistant Professor.

Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of scholarships from The Frost Place and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Hunger Mountain, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Southern Humanities Review. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Publishing Panel

Patrick Phillips

Patrick Phillips’ first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton in September of 2016. His third book of poems, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf, and named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. A past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation, Phillips is the author of two earlier collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems by the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University.

Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut novel 2AM at the Cat’s Pajamas was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick and an NPR Best Book of 2014. Her collection of short stories Safe as Houses won The Iowa Short Fiction award in 2012. Marie-Helene’s stories have appeared in Granta, Guernica, American Short Fiction, Five Chapters, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and been anthologized in Mississippi Review’s Anthology 30 and The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII. Her creative non-fiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and the Lonely Planet 2015 Anthology, among others. Her work has been translated into six languages. Marie-Helene teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at The Institute for Indian American Arts in Santa Fe. She lives in Brooklyn.

Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of six novels and three short story collections, including the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, the bestselling Transatlantic, and most recently, Thirteen Ways of Looking. Born in Dublin, Ireland, McCann has earned numerous international honors including a French Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, a Best Foreign Novel Award from China, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Oscar nomination. McCann’s fiction has been published in over 35 languages and appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and Esquire—which named McCann the “Writer of the Year” in 2003. The co-founder of the non-profit story exchange organization Narrative 4, McCann teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels The Mare, Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, and Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, a New York Times Notable Book, which received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She teaches at Princeton.

Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open. Also a translator of French and Polish, her most recent translation is Rochester Knockings, a novel by Tunisian-born writer Hubert Haddad. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Nation, and in four volumes of Best American Poetry. Director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she teaches at the University of Rochester.

Jess Row

Jess Row’s first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; his second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, appeared in 2011. His first novel, Your Face in Mine, was published in August 2014 and was recently released in paperback. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has also received an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers Award. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. Jess is an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, which was shortlisted for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. He is the recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a 2012 fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Playwriting fellowships include New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Theatre Workshop and Sundance Theatre Lab. His play, “All Fall Away,” was produced in London at Theatre 503. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Hunter College and New York University, where he received a 2013 Outstanding Teaching Award.

April 2015

April 2015

Patrick Phillips’ Elegy for a Broken Machine is forthcoming in 2015 from Alfred A. Knopf. A recent Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, he is the author of two earlier collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, published by Graywolf Press in 2010, the picture book I Am the Virgin Islands, published by Little Bell Caribbean in 2012) and the novel Land of Love and Drowning, published by Riverhead/Penguin on July 10th. BookPage listed her as one of the 14 Women to watch out for in 2014. Her writing has won the 2011 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and by the National Book Foundation as one of the 5 Under 35. Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Yanique is also the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship.

Tiphanie grew in the Hospital Ground/Round da Field neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She graduated from All Saints Cathedral School and the Rising Stars Youth Steel Orchestra program. Both her mother and grandmother were librarians in the Virgin Islands. Tiphanie is now an assistant professor in the MFA and Riggio Honors programs at the New School in New York City. She lives with her husband, son and daughter. They split their time between Brooklyn and St. Thomas.  tiphanieyanique.com

March 2015

Featuring readings by Drew’s Creative Writing faculty

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Slow Lightning, his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  eduardocorral.com

Eugene Cross is the author of the short story collection “Fires of Our Choosing,” which was long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named the Gold Medal winner in the Short Story category by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has taught creative writing at Penn State, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callaloo, among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. eugenecross.com.

Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens. Currently, she is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. She lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York.

Courtney Zoffness’ writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Fish Prize Stories, and others, as well as several creative writing anthologies. She also published extensive reportage while managing editor of The Earth Times. Her honors include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, teaching fellowships at Yale University, and a writer-in-residence post at the Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany. A 2013-14 NYC Emerging Writing Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons. courtneyzoffness.com

February 2015

Deji Olukotun graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, where he was taught by South African writers André Brink, Mike Nicol, Andre Wiesner, and Henrietta Rose-Innes. He also holds degrees from Yale College and Stanford Law School.

His novel Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published by Unnamed Press in 2014.

His work has been featured in Vice, Slate, GigaOm, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Millions, World Literature Today, ESPN, Chimurenga, Global Voices, Joyland, Words Without Borders, Alternet, Huffington Post, PEN America, The London Magazine, Molussus, The Beat, and Men’s Health. In 2013, he served as a juror for the Neustadt Festival of International Literature.

Deji is an attorney with a background in human rights and technology. He has traveled to over 25 countries and offers deep work experience in South Africa, Myanmar, and Haiti. He currently works at the digital rights organization Access, where he drives campaigns on net neutrality and surveillance. Before that, he fought for free expression and the defense of writers around the world at PEN American Center with support from the Ford Foundation.

Deji writes because he has to.  He can be found online at returnofthedeji.com.

November 2014

Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. His story “Redeployment” was originally published in Granta and is included in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere.

In 2014 Klay was named a National Book Foundation ’5 Under 35′ honoree, and his short story collection Redeployment is the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.  He can be found online at philklay.com.

In partnership with Writers@Drew, the Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Grant presents David Keefe, Director of Combat Paper NJ.  Keefe is also a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who, through Combat Paper NJ, helps teach other veterans papermaking and printmaking techniques to visually communicate their military experiences.  He will give a presentation about his organization, and join Klay for a Q&A following the event.  Combat Paper NJ can be found at the Printmaking Center of NJ.  Keefe’s personal work can be found at davidkeefe.net.

September 2014

Eugene Cross is the author of the short story collection “Fires of Our Choosing,” which was long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named the Gold Medal winner in the Short Story category by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has taught creative writing at Penn State, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callaloo, among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He can be found online at eugenecross.com.

April 2014

Readings by the 2014 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:

The Academy of American Poets’ Prize

The Goin Prize in Creative Writing

The Chapman Prize in Poetry

April 2014

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of numerous books, including Lark and Termite, which was a National Book Award Finalist, and Quiet Dell, which was published to critical acclaim last year. Her book Machine Dreams, a New York Times best seller, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve Best Books of the Year. Phillips is currently the Director of the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.  jayneannephillips.com

March 2014

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Slow Lightning, his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  eduardocorral.com

Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens. Currently, she is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. She lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York.

Patrick Phillips’ third book, Elegy for a Broken Machine, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. He is also the author of Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. His honors include Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.  patrickthemighty.blogspot.com

Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically acclaimed anthology of original fiction published by Akashic Books and HarperIndia. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. He was recently a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and is currently completing a novel.  hirshsawhney.com

Courtney Zoffness’ fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Tampa Review, the international Fish Prize Stories anthology, and elsewhere. The former managing editor of The Earth Times, she’s also published a range of nonfiction and reportage. Courtney was a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholar, a teaching fellow at Yale University, and a writer-in-residence at the Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany). She’s taught writing and literature at nearly a dozen institutions—in nearly as many cities. Currently she’s a 2013 Emerging Writing Fellow at the Center for Fiction in New York, and lives in Brooklyn.  courtneyzoffness.com

March 2014

Caryl Phillips