NYFA Presents: Three Decades of Writing Fellows with Gregory Pardlo, Deanna Fei, Shelly Oria, and Teddy Wayne
Thursday, April 28, 2016, 7:00 PM Reading at McNally Jackson Books
NYFA Board member and three-time fellowship recipient Saïd Sayrafiezadeh will be hosting the fourth event in this reading series featuring NYFA writing fellows and finalists. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo (Fellow ‘05), Deanna Fei (Fellow ‘06), Shelly Oria (Finalist ‘15), and Teddy Wayne (Finalist ‘12) will be reading.
NYFA Presents: Three Decades of Writing Fellows with Gregory Pardlo, Deanna Fei, Shelly Oria, and Teddy Wayne
Date: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 7:00 PM
Location: McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Host:
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir,When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Saïd teaches memoir in the MFA program at Hunter College and creative writing at New York University, where he received a 2013 Outstanding Teaching Award.
About the Readers:
Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. Pardlo’s poems appear in The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Pardlo serves on the faculty of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Deanna Fei is the author of the widely acclaimed memoir Girl in Glass (Bloomsbury), hailed as “exquisite” by The New York Times and “extraordinarily beautiful” by NPR. Her story has been featured on the Today Show, PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and MSNBC. Fei is also the author of the award-winning novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin, 2010). She was born in Flushing, New York, and graduated from Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, TIME, Fortune, and Slate, among other publications. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Paris Review among many other places, and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (FSG and Random House Canada, 2014) earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award, a Goldie Award, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. A MacDowell Fellow in 2012 and 2014, Shelly teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she co-directed the Writers’ Forum from 2011 to 2014. New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 was recently translated into Hebrew and published in Israel by Keter Publishing.
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner (forthcoming Sept. 2016 from Simon & Schuster), The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). A regular contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s, he is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He has taught at Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Yale Writers’ Conference, and he lives in New York.
NYFA’s Artists’ Fellowship program awards $7,000 cash grants to artists living in New York State. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the program and NYFA is celebrating with events and online content. Follow #NYFAFellows30 on social media for updates.
Images, from top: Exterior McNally Jackson Books, Photo Credit: Yvonne Brooks; Saïd Sayrafiezadeh photo © Basso Cannarsa; Gregory Pardlo, Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths; Deanna Fei, Photo Credit: Peter S. Goodman; Shelly Oria, Photo credit: T Kira Madden; Teddy Wayne, Photo Credit: Kate Greathead.
