Newhouse Center for the Humanities Distinguished Writers and Speakers

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.