NYFA Presents: PEN America Reading with Abeer Hoque, Lisa Ko, Sarah Schulman, and Joan Silber

NYFA and PEN America present a reading featuring NYFA Literary Fellows and PEN America Members.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of NYFA’s Artists’ Fellowship program, this event will bring together writers whose NYFA Fellowship helped foster their creative work. Now established in their writing careers, these Fellows are all Professional Members of PEN America, an organization of writers, editors, and translators fighting to defend free expression and celebrate literature abroad and here in the United States. NYFA Board member, three-time NYFA Fellow, and PEN America Member Saïd Sayrafiezadeh will moderate.

Date: Tuesday, August 16, 7:30 PM
Location: Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217

This event is free and open to the public. Click here to RSVP. 

Biographies

Moderator:

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Board Member, Playwriting/Screenwriting ‘96, ‘06, Fiction ‘10) 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.

Readers:

Abeer Hoque (Nonfiction ‘14) is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She is the author of a coffee table book, The Long Way Home; a book of linked stories, The Lovers and the Leavers; and a memoir, Olive Witch. She is the recipient of a 2005 Tanenbaum Award and a 2007 Fulbright Scholarship. She has attended residencies at Saltonstall, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, and Albee. Her writing and photography have been published in ZYZZYVA, 580 Split, XConnect, Drunken Boat, Swink, Nerve.com, Switchback, India Today, the Daily Star (Bangladesh), the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, Wasafiri, and KQED Writers’ Block.

Lisa Ko (Fiction ’02) is the author of The Leavers, a novel which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and will be published by Algonquin Books in May 2017. Her fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2016. A fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Lisa has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and Hawthornden Castle.

Sarah Schulman (Fiction ’87, ’91, Playwriting/Screenwriting ’06) is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian and journalist. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Faculty Advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine. Sarah is co-founder of the ACT UP Oral History Project and MIX: NY Queer Experimental Film Festival. The Cosmopolitans, a novel, is Sarah’s seventeenth book.

Joan Silber (Fiction ’86) is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other works include The Size of the World, finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize, Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and Household Words, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize, and Pushcart Prize collections. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and she lives in Manhattan.

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 left to right: Abeer Hoque (Nonfiction ’14), Photo Credit: Kat Burdick; Lisa Ko (Fiction ’02), Photo Credit: Bartosz Potocki; Sarah Schulman (Fiction ’87, ’91, Playwriting/Screenwriting ’06), Photo Credit: Drew Stevens; Joan Silber (Fiction ’86), Photo Credit: Barry Goldstein; and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Board Member, Playwriting/Screenwriting ‘96, ‘06, Fiction ‘10), Photo Credit: Basso Cannarsa