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  Monday, March 18

  7:00pm

  KGB: Monday Night Poetry: Austin Smith + Dora Malech + Grace Schulman

  Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He has published three poetry chapbooks: In the Silence of the Migrated Birds; Wheat and Distance; Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down; and one full-length collection, Almanac, which was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the …

  Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He has published three poetry chapbooks: In the Silence of the Migrated Birds; Wheat and Distance; Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down; and one full-length collection, Almanac, which was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His next collection, Flyover Country, will be published by Princeton in Fall 2018. Austin’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, amongst others. His stories have appeared or will appear in Harper’s, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, EPOCH, Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review, Fiction and Narrative Magazine. He was the recipient of the 2015 Narrative Prize for his short story, “The Halverson Brothers,” and an NEA Fellowship in Prose for FY 2018. He is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism. He lives in Oakland.
  
  Dora Malech is the author of Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her fourth collection, Flourish, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2020. She has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize from the Baker Artist Awards, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Having taught at institutions that include the University of Iowa, Augustana College in Illinois, and the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, she is now an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she recently received the 2016 Crenson-Hertz Award for Community Based Learning and Participatory Research.
  
  Grace Schulman is distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and served as the poetry editor of the Nation from 1972 to 2006. She also directed the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. She has published six collections of poetry, including Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (2002), The Broken String (2007), and Without a Claim (2013). Her collection of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures (2010), reflects on her life as a writer and reader. Schulman has received numerous awards for her work, including the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and Pushcart prizes. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been published the Nation, the New Yorker, and numerous other magazines and journals, and appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1998. Schulman was married to the scientist Jerome L. Schulman before his death in 2016. She lives in New York City and East Hampton.

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  Oct 11, 2018

  7:00pm-9:00pm

  Behind the Book with Laird Hunt & Tamsen Wolff

  Join Laird Hunt and Tamsen Wolff for an evening of lyrical storytelling in support of Behind the Book, a local literacy nonprofit celebrating its 15th year of getting kids in NYC public schools excited about reading! Laird Hunt’s lyrical latest novel, IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS, is the …

  Join Laird Hunt and Tamsen Wolff for an evening of lyrical storytelling in support of Behind the Book, a local literacy nonprofit celebrating its 15th year of getting kids in NYC public schools excited about reading!
  
  Laird Hunt’s lyrical latest novel, IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS, is the fourth tale in his masterful America series exploring both the evils and the possible grace of humanity through the lives of women at pivotal moments in American history. Set in colonial New England years before the Salem witch trials, his latest tells the story of a law-abiding, God-fearing woman who goes missing. Or who perhaps fled and abandoned her family. Or been kidnapped and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. A horror story about a woman who stands at a crossroads of American history, IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS weaves psychological horror and suspense into a contemporary fairy tale. Laird is the acclaimed author of seven novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. KIND ONE was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and NEVERHOME won the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and The Bridge Prize and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger. His most recent novel, THE EVENING ROAD, was a Financial Times of London Best Book of 2017. A former United Nations press officer, Laird took up a Professorship of Literary Arts at Brown University this September.
  
  “Part psychological thriller, part fairy tale, part mystery, and entirely Hunt’s own, In the House in the Dark of the Woods continues Hunt’s American history trilogy with his characteristic lyricism and storytelling acumen. I admire how even the minor characters cast long shadows, how we are in the past, yes, but so very much in the present. With the surprise of fairy tale and fable, but the complexity of one's favorite literary novel, Laird Hunt again gives us of fierce, complex women living in American history.”
  
  – Tara Shea Nesbit, author of THE WIVES OF LOS ALAMOS
  
  Tamsen Wolff’s acclaimed debut novel, JUNO'S SWANS, vividly brings to life the dizzying experience of first love – and its inevitable partner, first heartbreak, in the late 1980s. With lyrical prose, nuanced characters, and an evocative narrative voice, JUNO'S SWANS weaves a nuanced depiction of female relationships – both romantic and platonic – against the waning of the Reagan years and the burgeoning HIV-AIDS crisis and the post-Stonewall emergence of a strong LGBTQ movement. Tamsen is a professor in Princeton University’s English Department, where she specializes in modern and contemporary drama and performance, gender studies, cultural studies, directing, voice, and dramaturgy. She lives with her family in Princeton.
  
  "With its acutely portrayed psychological depth, a heady summer at its heart, and its focus on a well-worn friendship that becomes uncharted territory when first love enters the picture, Wolff's debut, coming-of-age novel casts a literary spell that recalls the dazzling second book of Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan novels, The Story of a New Name."
  
  – BOOKLIST
  
  www.behindthebook.org

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• 

  Sep 13, 2018

  7:00pm-9:00pm

  Behind the Book: Mira T. Lee, Rosalie Knecht, Natasha Scripture, & Eleanor Kriseman

  Join the NYC literacy nonprofit Behind the Book in kicking off its 14th reading series season with four powerful women authors exploring how we keep (and find) our own identity in relationships with family, illness, love, and societal pressures. And even better – one of the stories features a spy!…

  Join the NYC literacy nonprofit Behind the Book in kicking off its 14th reading series season with four powerful women authors exploring how we keep (and find) our own identity in relationships with family, illness, love, and societal pressures. And even better – one of the stories features a spy! FREE, with raffle of the authors’ signed books.
  
  Mira T. Lee’s stunning debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful, is an incredibly moving and thoughtful exploration of mental illness in an immigrant family, and a young woman’s quest to find fulfillment and a life unconstrained by her illness. But it’s also an unforgettable, gut-wrenching story of the sacrifices we make to truly love someone—and when loyalty to one’s self must prevail over all. Mira’s work has been published in numerous quarterlies and reviews, including The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Triquarterly. She was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2012, and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize.
  
  Rosalie Knecht is a writer, social worker, and translator in New York City. Her thrillingly original and utterly smart and fresh second novel, Who Is Vera Kelly?, is a genre-pushing literary spy thriller, featuring a complex treatment of queer identity during the Cold War. A lesbian struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village, Vera Kelly is recruited by the CIA and finds herself hopscotching from New York City to Buenos Aires, fueled by gin and cigarettes, on the run from her past and equipped with a case of listening devices. Rosalie’s other work includes the novel Relief Map and a translation of Aira’s The Seamstress and the Wind. She is a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, and writes the Dear Book Therapist column at Lit Hub.
  
  Natasha Scripture is an author, poet, activist, and former aid worker. As a spokesperson for the United Nations, Natasha covered humanitarian crises around the world, including conflicts and natural disasters in Ethiopia, Haiti, Libya, and Pakistan. Her powerfully written first book, the memoir Man Fast, a grand travelogue and a meditation at reclaiming independence, has been published in the U.K. and is forthcoming in the U.S in spring 2019. After the sudden death of her father and an iterant life as an aid worker, Natasha embarks on a “man fast” to stop looking for that special someone to fill an imaginary void inside her and turns inward to process her grief and explore the question at the heart of her anxiety: what is her purpose? Before the UN, Natasha worked as a writer, producer, and editor for a variety of organizations, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, and Condé Nast Publications. She has also contributed to The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other publications.
  
  Eleanor Kriseman’s stand-out debut novel, The Blurry Years, is a powerful and unorthodox coming-of-age story about what it’s like to grow up too fast and absorb too much, to watch adults behaving badly, and to be simultaneously in thrall to and terrified of the mother who is the only family you’ve ever known, who moves you from town to town to leave her own mistakes behind. Eleanor is a social worker in New York.
  
  www.behindthebook.org

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