NYFA Presents: Three Decades of Writing Fellows with Kathryn Harrison, Phillip Lopate, Catherine Lacey, and Rajesh Parameswaran

Monday, January 25, 7:00 PM Reading at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City

NYFA Board member and three-time fellowship recipient Saïd Sayrafiezadeh will be returning to host the third event in this reading series featuring NYFA writing fellows. Kathryn Harrison (Fellow ‘94), Phillip Lopate (Fellow ‘91), Catherine Lacey (Fellow ‘12), and Rajesh Parameswaran (Fellow ‘15) will be reading.

NYFA Presents: Three Decades of Writing Fellows with Kathryn Harrison, Phillip Lopate, Catherine Lacey,  and Rajesh Parameswaran
Date: Monday, January 25, 2016, 7:00 PM; Doors and the cafe open at 6:30 and the reading will start sharply at 7.
Location: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby 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:

Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels Enchantments, Envy, The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water.  She has also written memoirs, The Kiss and The Mother Knot, a travel memoir, The Road to Santiago, two biographies, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured and Saint Therese of Lisieux, a collection of personal essays, Seeking Rapture, and a work of true crime, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family. 

Her second collection of personal essays, True Crimes: A Family Album, will be published this April by Random House. Ms. Harrison is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review; her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, O Magazine, MORE, Tin House, Zoetrope All-Story, and other publications. 

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979.  He has written four personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, and a memoir among many other publications. His most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008), Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), and To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2013).  He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants.  He is currently a Professor of Writing at Columbia University, where he directs the graduate nonfiction program.

Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a winner of the 2015 Debutlitzer. Five translations are forthcoming. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Oxford American, Guernica, McSweeney’s Quarterly and elsewhere. Her second novel and first collection of short stories are forthcoming from FSG and abroad.

Rajesh Parameswaran is a fiction writer and author of the short story collection I Am an Executioner: Love Stories (Knopf), one of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction for 2012. His work has appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing, Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story. He has been awarded a fellowship from the NEA, and residences at: the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center; the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard; the MacDowell Colony; the Ucross Foundation; the Santa Maddalena Foundation; the Dora Maar House; and Yaddo. His story “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan” was one of three that earned McSweeney’s the National Magazine Award for fiction.

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. Applications are currently open with awards being offered this cycle in  Architecture / Environmental Structures / Design, Choreography, Music/Sound, Photography, and Playwriting/Screenwriting.

Images, from top: Courtesy Housing Works; Saïd Sayrafiezadeh photo © Basso Cannarsa; Kathryn Harrison, Photo Credit: Joyce Ravid; Phillip Lopate, Photo Credit: Miriam Berkley; Catherine Lacey, Photo Credit: Lauren Volo; Rajesh Parameswaran.