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PEN America and New York Foundation for the Arts Present: An Evening of Readings by PEN America Members and NYFA Literary Fellows

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and PEN America present a reading featuring NYFA Literary Fellows and PEN America Members. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of NYFA’s fellowship program, this event will bring together writers whose NYFA fellowship helped foster their creative work. Now established in their writing careers, these former NYFA fellows are all Professional Members of PEN America. Reception to follow.

This is a free event, but RSVPs are required. Please RSVP by August 12: http://bit.ly/PEN-NYFA-RSVP

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Moderator 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.

Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She likes scrabble, spreadsheets, and sliding doors. Her books include a travel photography and poetry monograph (The Long Way Home), a collection of linked stories, poems, and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers), and a memoir, Olive Witch (2017). See more at olivewitch.com.

Lisa Ko 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 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 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. Her website is joansilber.net.