Newhouse Center for the Humanities

Salar Abdoh reads from his novel Tehran at Twilight. Gina Nahai reads from her novel The Luminous Hearat of Jonah S. Yu Jin Ko, Professor of English at Wellesley, introduces the two writers. The discussion took place on April 4, 2015 as part of the Distinguished Writers Series at the Newhouse Center. Salar Abdoh was born in Iran, and splits his time between Tehran and New York City, where he is codirector of the Creative Writing MFA Program at the City College of New York. He is the author of The Poet Game and Opium. His essays and short stories have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, BOMB, Callaloo, Guernica, and on the BBC. He is the recipient of the NYFA Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts award. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and the author of Tehran at Twilight, his latest novel. Gina B. Nahai is a best-selling author, and a professor of Creative Writing at USC. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and have been selected as “One of the Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Nahai’s books include Cry of the Peacock(1992), Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (1999), Sunday’s Silence (2001) and Caspian Rain (2007),. Her new novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., was published by Akashic Books in October, 2014.

Ha Jin reads from his novel A Map of Betrayal, published in 2014. After his reading, Ha Jin discusses his work with Mingwei Song, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures. This event took place March 30, 2015 at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities as part of the Newhouse Center Distinguished Writers Series. Born in China in 1956, Pulitzer nominated author Ha Jin was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution. He became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen. His novel Waiting, which won him the National Book Award in 1999, and the PEN/ Faulkner in 2000, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. He was awarded the PEN/ Faulkner again in 2005 for War Trash.

Benjamin Percy and Etgar Keret read from and discuss their work. They are introduced by Jonathan Wilson, Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. The event took place on November 11, 2014 Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award for Fiction; and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His second novel, a psychological thriller entitled Red Moon, was published in 2013 (Hachette). His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, where he is a regular contributor, Men's Journal, Outside, the Paris Review, Tin House, Chicago Tribune, Orion, GQ, Men's Health, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His story "Refresh, Refresh" was adapted into a screenplay by filmmaker James Ponsoldt and a graphic novel (First Second Books, 2009) by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University. Hailed as the voice of young Israel and one of its most radical and extraordinary writers, Etgar Keret is internationally acclaimed for his short stories. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family, his brother heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, and his sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children. Keret regards his family as a microcosm of Israel. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness of life in Israel today. Rarely extending beyond three or four pages, these stories fuse the banal with the surreal. Shot through with a dark, tragicomic sensibility and casual, comic-strip violence, he offers a window on a surreal world that is at once funny and sad. His most recent book, Suddenly a Knock on the Door (2010), became an instant #1 bestseller in Israel and came out in the US in 2012.

Nathalie Handal and Robin Robertson read their poems. They are introduced by Dan Chiasson, Associate Professor of English at Wellesley College. The event took place on October 27, 2014. Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world. Her most recent books include the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, which Alice Walker lauds as “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve,” and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Handal is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, both Academy of American Poets bestsellers. Her most recent plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey, London. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the 2011 Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College. Robin Robertson is from the Northeast coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry–most recently Hill of Doors–and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarch Prize, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cholmondeley Award, and all three Forward Prizes. He has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame; translated two plays of Euripides, Medea and theBacchae; and, in 2006, published The Deleted World, a selection of free English versions of poems by the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, will be out from FGS in Fall 2014.

Chris Abani' reads from his novel The Secret History of Las Vegas. Cristina García reads from her novel King of Cuba. The discussion took place on April 1, 2014, and was moderated by Elena Creef, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Cristina García is the author of six novels: King of Cuba, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, A Handbook to Luck, Monkey Hunting, The Agüero Sisters, winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban, finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature(2006) and Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (2003). She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls (2011), a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s; The Dog Who Loved the Moon, illustrated by Sebastia Serra, (Atheneum, 2008); and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox (Simon and Schuster, 2008). A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death (Akashic Books), was published in 2010. García holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Barnard College, and a Master's degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into 14 languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has been a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and The University of Miami. She teaches part time at Texas Tech University and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14 Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames,Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA in English (Nigeria), an MA in Gender and Culture (Birkbeck College, University of London), an MA in English and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing (University of Southern California). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize & a Guggenheim Award. 

Claire Messud reads from her novel The Woman Upstairs, published in April 2013. After her reading, Claire discusses her work with Duncan White, Resident Fellow at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities. Claire was born in the United States in 1966 to a French father and a Canadian mother, and was raised in Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada, before returning to the States in 1980. Educated at Yale and Cambridge universities, she lived in London until 1995, where she was Deputy Editor of the Guardian newspaper’s Women’s Page. Claire has taught at various colleges and universities, including Amherst College and Kenyon College, and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice; all three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel, The Emperor’s Children, was on several best books of the year lists, including the Los Angeles Times, Economist, Chicago Tribune, and People magazine, and was named one of the “10 Best Books of the Year” for 2006 by the New York Times Book Review. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and the Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Deni Béchard was born in British Columbia to Québécois and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has also traveled in over fifty countries. His recently-published memoir, Cures for Hunger, describes growing up with his father who was a bank robber, and was both an IndieNext pick and Amazon Canada’s editor’s pick as one of the best memoir/biography of 2012. Empty Hands, Open Arms, a book about conservation in the Congo rainforest, was published in October 2013. His first novel, Vandal Love, was published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal / La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009), and in 2012 was on Oprah’s Book Club’s summer reading list. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Edward Albee Foundation. He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and has written for a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the LA Times, Outside, Salon, VQR, the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He is introduced by Rachid Aadnani, Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Wellesley College.

Film director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus spoke at Wellesley College on Saturday, October 26. “Ang Lee is one of the most important figures in Chinese cinema—and probably the most famous figure from Chinese cinema in the entire world,” said Mingwei Song, assistant professor of Chinese at Wellesley. Song’s work specializes in modern Chinese literature, film studies, and youth culture. Lee has won the Academy Award for Best Direction for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Life of Pi (2012) and the Award for Best Foreign Language Film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) in addition to numerous prestigious prizes from European and Asian film festivals. Schamus is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, producer, and film executive, and a widely published film historian and theorist. His long collaboration as writer and producer for Ang Lee has resulted in 11 films, including Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Ice Storm; The Wedding Banquet; The Hulk; Taking Woodstock and Lust, Caution. As moderator, Song asked questions of the pair exploring their collaboration and career together as well as film themes before turning the questions over to the audience. One theme that Song is excited to explore starts with the question, “Who is the tiger?” referencing the representation of the tiger in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi.

Siddhartha Deb reads from his latest book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. He is introduced by Nikhil Rao, Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Siddhartha Deb was born in northeastern India in 1970. His first novel, The Point of Return, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His reviews and journalism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Guardian, The Nation, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement. He came to New York on a literary fellowship in 1998, and now divides his time between India and New York.

Maud Casey reads from her forthcoming novel, The Man Who Walked Away. Karen Russell reads her short story The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis. They are introduced by Duncan White, Newhouse Resident Fellow at Wellesley College. Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, as well as a collection of stories, Drastic. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The New York Times, Oxford American, A Public Space, Salon, and The Threepenny Review.  She has received international fellowships from the Fundaçion Valparaiso, the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, Villa Hellebosch, Château de Lavigny, and Dora Maar, and is the recipient of the Calvino Prize. Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2011,” and was long-listed for The Orange Prize. Russell has been featured in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation.  Formerly a writer-in-residence at Bard College and Bryn Mawr College, she is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.  Russell is also the author of the celebrated short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the short story collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove, (published by Knopf in January 2013). Russell received her B.A. from Northwestern University in 2003, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2006.

Bill Tremblay is a poet, novelist, librettist, and reviewer. He directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Colorado State University, founded the Colorado Review and served as its chief editor for 15 years. His work has appeared in seven full-length volumes including Crying in the Cheap Seats [UMass Press], The Anarchist Heart [New Rivers Press: 1975]. Home Front [Lynx House Press: 1978]. Second Sun: New & Selected Poems [l”Eperiver Press: 1983]. Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada [BOA Editions Ltd.1986], Rainstorm Over the Alphabet [Lynx House Press, 1998], Shooting Script: Door of Fire [Eastern Washington University Press, 2003] which won the Colorado Book Award. His most recent book is: Magician’s Hat: Poems on the Life and Art of David Alfaro Siqueiros [Lynx House Press: 2013]. He received the John F. Stern Distinguished Professor Award in 2004. Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who currently teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world. His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier.

Marjorie Agosin introduces poets Anis Mojgani and Marilyn Nelson. Anis Mojgani is a two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam.   Anis has performed at numerous universities, festivals, and venues around the globe. He has performed for audiences as varied as the House of Blues and the United Nations, and his work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in the pages of such journals asRattle, Used Furniture Review, Muzzle, and The Lumberyard. A founding member of the touring Poetry Revival, Anis is also the author of two poetry collections, both published by Write Bloody Publishing: Over the Anvil We Stretch (2008) and The Feather Room (2011).  Marilyn Nelson is a poet, translator and children's book author.  Her poetry collections include The Homeplace, which won the 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Award, and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award, and The Fields of Praise:  New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award.  Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2012, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Frost Medal.  Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and the founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat.  She was poet laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Don Lee reads from his most recent novel, The Collective. Stephanie Reents reads her short story None of the Above. They are introduced by Adam Schwartz, Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Lee's previous work includes Wrack and Ruin; Country of Origin; and the story collection Yellow. He is currently the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Temple University. Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List.  She has been a Bread Loaf Conference Scholar, a Stegner Fellow, and Rhodes scholar.  She is an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross and she lives in Providence, RI. 

Junot Díaz, award-winning author (Drown, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) and 2012 MacArthur "genius", reads from his most recent collection of short stores, "This is How You Lose Her." Please be advised that Junot Díaz occasionally uses strong language in this recording.

Mat Johnson reads the first chapter of a work in progress, and Tracy Smith recites from her poetry collection Life on Mars. The writers discuss shared themes of racial identity and home. Introduction by Yu Jin Ko, Professor of English at Wellesley.

Author Geoff Dyer discusses his latest book, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, which was published in the UK and the US in Spring 2012. Geoff Dyer is introduced by Newhouse Fellow Eugenie Brinkema, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at MIT.

Award-winning author Nathan Englander reads a selection from his short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank". Author Jimmy Wallenstein introduces and interviews Englander.

Distinguished Writers Series: Nikky Finney and Tom Sleigh Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 4:30PM Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff's Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney's fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry. Tom Sleigh's books include After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Prize; Waking, a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Chain, finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize; The Dreamhouse, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Far Side of the Earth, an Honor Book Award from the Massachusetts Society for the Book; Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks; a translation of Euripides' Herakles; a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost; and Space Walk, winner of the $100,000 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has also received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Best American Travel Writing anthologies His new book, Army Cats, was published this spring from Graywolf Press. This fall he was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

Margot Livesey, the Guggenheim-winning author of The House on Fortune Street and The Flight of Gemma Hardy, discusses her friendship with Andrea Barrett, whose works include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map and the National Book Award winning Ship Fever. Livesey reads from their recent works and recounts how their literary friendship of over twenty years has shaped each of their work. February 2012.

Leah Hager Cohen, the author of four novels including The Grief of Others and four works of narrative nonfiction including Train Go Sorry, is the Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including Project X, and four story collections, including the National Book Award finalist Like You’d Understand, Anyway and You Think That’s Bad, released April 2011. Following readings from Shepard and Cohen, Marilyn Sides, professor of English at Wellesley College, moderated a discussion. The event took place as part of Distinguished Writers Series at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities in March 2012.

Pico Iyer reads from The Man Within My Head, his latest book, in which he examines his connection to Graham Greene. Following the reading, Ato Quayson, a Newhouse Center fellow and the Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto, leads a discussion about Iyer's work.

The New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman and writers Aleksandar Hemon and Hilton Als join forces for a conversation about the art of writing and the editorial process. Treisman, The New Yorker's youngest fiction editor ever, has also worked for The New York Review of Books and Harper's. Hemon is author of The Lazarus Project, which was a National Book Award and National Critics Circle Award finalist. Als, who is currently serving as Newhouse Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College, has worked as a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1994.

The writers Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Sarah Broom discussed their interest in two communities that are closely identified with people of color, Harlem and New Orleans, in an event moderated by Noah Chasin, asst. professor of art history at Bard. In this excerpt from the event, Broom reads from her short piece "Letting Her Go" about the decision to move from New Orleans, while Rhodes-Pitts reads from her book Harlem Is Nowhere (2011), part of a trilogy on African-Americans and utopia.

Francisco Goldman is the author of three novels, including the Kaufman Prize for First Fiction winner The Long Night of White Chickens, as well as many works of criticism and investigative journalism. Goldman reads from his latest book, Say Her Name, written about his marriage to writer Aura Estrada and the unexpected tragedy of her death in 2007. Award-winning author Junot Díaz introduces Goldman and leads a discussion following the reading. The reading took place at Wellesley College in November 2011 as part of the Newhouse Center Distinguished Writers Series.

Christian Campbell, a Bahamian and Trinidadian poet whose book Running the Dusk won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, gave a reading with Nina Revoyr, the author of four novels including the Lambda Award winner Southland and the 2011 novel Wingshooters. The readings took place as part of the Distinguished Writers Series of the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. Elena Creef, a professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley and Newhouse Center fellow, led a discussion following the readings about multicultural writing, the role of personal experience, and the writing process.

Espada, a Pulitzer Prize finalist called "the Latino poet of his generation" by the New York Times, has published over fifteen books of poetry, translation, and essays. Girmay is the author of two collections of poetry, for which she has won awards including the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the NEA Literature Fellowship, and teaches poetry at Hampshire College. Following the readings, Marjorie Agosín, professor of Spanish at Wellesley College and winner of the Latino Literature Prize for Poetry, led a discussion on bilingual literature and the social value of poetry. Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities featured readings from Martín Espada and Aracelis Girmay as part of the Distinguished Writers Series in October 2011. 

Lydia Davis, who published a widely acclaimed new translation of Madame Bovary in fall 2010, gave a reading at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities in September 2011 for the Distinguished Writers Series. Davis received a MacArthur “genius” grant for her writing in 2003, and has published one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She read a series of works from her Collected Stories, published in 2009, as well as a series of short stories inspired by Flaubert's letters. Following the reading, Dan Chiasson, associate professor of English at Wellesley College, led a discussion about the techniques and motivations behind Davis' "painstaking and precise" work.

Cartoonists Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel have created two of the most significant autobiographies of the 21st-century. In April 2011, Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities presented readings from Bechdel, author of the syndicated comic Dykes to Watch Out For and the groundbreaking graphic autobiography Fun Home, and Barry, author of the weekly Ernie Pook's Comeek as well as the award-winning graphic novel What It Is. The event focused on how these two acclaimed artists have represented aspects of their lives in graphic autobiographies that have changed the field of contemporary narrative. Hillary Chute, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, moderated a discussion following the reading.

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous books of nonfiction and fiction, including Crossing the River (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), A Distant Shore (winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize), and Dancing in the Dark (winner of the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award). In this recording, Phillips reads from A Distant Shore and discusses his work with Margaret Cezair-Thompson, a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing and the author of The True History of Paradise and The Pirate's Daughter.

Israel's most celebrated novelist, Meir Shalev has written many novels, including "A Pigeon and a Boy", winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award, and "Russan Romance (The Blue Mountain)", one of the top five bestsellers in Israeli publishing history. In this recording, he reads from his newest book Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible's Intriguing Firsts--with help from Wellesley English Professor Larry Rosenwald.

Ha Jin is the award-winning author of five novels, four collections of stories, three volumes of poetry, and one collection of essays. His novels include Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, and War Trash, winner of the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award. In this recording, he reads from his newest story collection, A Good Fall, which focuses on Flushing, one of New York City's largest Chinese immigrant communities. Jonathan Wilson, Director of the Humanities Center and Fletcher professor for Rhetoric and Debate at Tufts University, introduces Ha Jin and shares a conversation with him after the reading.

Peter Carey's most recent novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, is on the short list for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Two of his previous novels have already won the award--The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001, and Oscar and Lucinda in 1988. Carey was born in Austrailia in 1943. He lives in New York City. Peter Carey spoke at Wellesley College's Newhouse Center for the Humanities on September 28, 2010.

Colum McCann reads from his most recent novel, published in June 2009. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Colum McCann is the author of two story collections and five novels, including This Side of Brightness; Dancer; Zoli; and Let the Great World Spin (winner of the 2009 National Book Award). Colum McCann spoke at Wellesley College's Newhouse Center for the Humanities on March, 30, 2010.

Russell Banks reads his short story "Lobster Night", first published in 2000. His novels include The Reserve, The Darling, The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter, Affliction, and Continental Drift.  Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift were finalists for the Pulitizer Prize.  Russell Banks lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. He spoke at Wellesley College's Newhouse Center for the Humanities on October 26, 2010.