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The Program in Creative Writing presents

ALTHEA WARD CLARK W’21 The Program in Creative Writing presents READING SERIES 2015-16

Wednesday, September 30 Wednesday, 9 HODDER FELLOWS: Edwidge Danticat Natalie Diaz Robert Hass Althea Ward Clark W ’21 Phil Klay Wednesday, April 6 Wednesday, October 14 Ciaran Berry Jhumpa Lahiri Nell Zink Mary Szybist Wednesday, April 27 Wednesday, November 18 Student Readings Chancellor Green Rotunda Dorianne Laux Monday, May 2 Wednesday, December 16 Thesis Readings in Poetry, Student Readings Screenwriting, and Prospect House Wednesday, February 10 Marlon James Wednesday, May 4 Claudia Rankine Thesis Readings in Fiction WEDNESDAY, Prospect House OCTOBER 14, 2015 Tuesday, October 27 Reading by: Marie Howe delivers the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes Lecture Jhumpa Lahiri Mary Szybist All readings take place at 4:30 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center unless noted otherwise. Free and open to the public. For more about the Program in Creative Writing visit The Berlind Theatre arts.princeton.edu McCarter Theatre Center JHUMPA LAHIRI MARY SZYBIST Introduced by A. M. Homes Introduced by James Richardson

Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize Review and Denver Quarterly and was in 2000 for , her featured in Best American Poetry (2008). debut story collection that explores In 2009, she was awarded a Witter Bynner issues of love and identity among Fellowship and a literature fellowship from immigrants and cultural transplants. With the NEA. She is an associate professor a compelling fluency, Lahiri portrays the of English at Lewis & Clark in Portland, practical and emotional adversities of her Oregon, and is a member of the faculty diverse characters in elegant and direct at the Warren Wilson College MFA prose. Whether describing hardships of a Program for Writers. She also has taught lonely Indian wife adapting to life in the at Kenyon College, the University of Iowa, United States or illuminating the secret the Tennessee Governor’s School for pain of a young couple as they discuss Humanities, the University of Virginia’s their betrayals during a series of electrical Young Writers’ Workshop, and West High blackouts, Lahiri’s bittersweet stories School in Iowa City. avoid sentimentality without abandoning compassion. “In her gorgeous second collection, Mary Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake Szybist blends traditional and experimental was published in the fall of 2003 to great aesthetics to recast the myth of the Biblical acclaim. The Namesake expands on the Mary for this era. In vulnerable lyrics, perplexities of the immigrant experience photo by Marco Delogu photo by Joni Kabana surprising concrete poems, and other and the search for identity. The narrative forms, and with extraordinary sympathy follows the Gangulis, an Indian couple Lahiri observes that her parents retain “a Mary Szybist grew up in Pennsylvania. and a light touch of humor, Szybist probes united in an arranged marriage, as they sense of emotional exile” and Lahiri herself She earned degrees from the University the nuances of love, loss, and the struggle build their lives together in America. grew up with “conflicting expectations… of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ for religious faith in a world that seems to Unlike her husband, Mrs. Ganguli defies to be Indian by Indians and American by Workshop, where she was a Teaching- argue against it. This is a religious book assimilation, while their son, Gogol, Americans.” Lahiri’s abilities to convey Writing Fellow. Her first collection of for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary burdened with the seemingly absurd the oldest cultural conflicts in the most poetry, Granted (2003), was a finalist for doubts for the faithful.” name of the long-dead Russian writer, immediate fashion and to achieve the voices the National Book Critics Circle Award —National Book Award Committee awkwardly struggles to define himself. A of many different characters are among the and the winner of the 2004 Great Lakes film version ofThe Namesake (directed unique qualities that have captured the Colleges Associations New Writers Award. “Mary Szybist’s poems are about religious by ) was released in 2007. attention of a wide audience. Her second book, Incarnadine (2013), and sexual longing and about suspicion of Lahiri’s most recent book of short stories, won the National Book Award for Poetry. religious and sexual longing. They exist in, entitled Unaccustomed Earth, received Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri According to judge Kay Ryan, Syzbist’s or move toward, the negative spaces, the the 2008 Frank O’Connor International also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. “lovely musical touch is light and exact luminous, maddening almost presences the Award (the world’s largest Henry Prize (for the short story “Interpreter enough to catch the weight and grind of objects of our deepest desires inhabit. She prize for a short story collection). Her of Maladies”), the Addison Metcalf Award love. This is a hard paradox to master as has a gift for music, a gift for aphorism, a most recent book, The Lowland, won the from the American Academy of Arts and she does.” gift for being haunted. This is serious work, DSC award for south Asian fiction, and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize so it is occasionally funny and sometimes was a finalist for both the Man Booker and the Asian American Literary Award. Szybist is also the recipient of a Rona strange and often beautiful. ‘Original prize and the National Book Award in Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a research in language,’ Ezra Pound said the fiction. Fellowship in 2002 and an National fellowship from the National Endowment real thing was. This is it.” —Robert Hass Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006. for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize in Born in , Lahiri moved to Rhode She has recently joined the Lewis Center for 2012. She has been awarded residencies Island as a young child with her Bengali the Art’s Program in Creative Writing faculty from the MacDowell Colony and the parents. Although they have lived in the at as Professor of Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. United States for more than thirty years, Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the Iowa