I'm teaching a class on Public Writing for Academics at the Grad Center this semester, and I've invited a wonderful group of cultural critics, literary journalists, and editors, some of whom are also poets, translators, and novelists, to come and talk with grad students about their writing lives! They will each reflect on their non-linear writing and publishing careers, share craft and professional advice, and answer any questions you may have. 

All Queens College MA and MFA students are warmly invited to attend and participate in any or all of the conversations! 

(These events aren't open to the public, though, so please don't share the Zoom link beyond this list.)

All events are at 4.30 and will last about an hour. The Zoom link is at the very end of this email and it will work for every event. 

Our first guest, Jennifer L. Wilson, is profiled below along with the others. I'm asking each guest to share a couple pieces they've written in case you'd like to read them in advance-- links to Jenn's are below!

Really looking forward to seeing some of you tomorrow and/or in the weeks to come!

Bri

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September 30: Carina Del Valle Schorske

Carina Del Valle Schorske is a writer, editor, and translator whose poems, essays, reviews, translations, and interviews have been published at the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, VQR, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in  Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is at work on her first book, a psychogeography of Puerto Rican culture forthcoming from Riverhead. 

October 7: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote (Simon and Schuster, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others, and has been interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Before becoming a full-time writer, he pursued graduate work in English.

October 21: Scott Poulson-Bryant

Scott Poulson-Bryant is a cultural historian, critic, and novelist and an Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is currently finishing his monograph Everybody is a Star: Cultural Citizenships and the Glamour of Blackness in 1970s US Popular Culture. Prior to academia, he wrote HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday) and The VIPs: A Novel (Broadway/Random House). He has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and elsewhere, and he was one of the founding editors of VIBE Magazine. 

October 28: Randi Hutter Epstein

Randi Hutter Epstein is a medical writer who focuses on the interplay between medicine and society. She serves at Yale University as a Writer in Residence at the medical school and lecturer in the English Department, and is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has worked as a medical writer for the London bureau of The Associated Press and was the London bureau chief of Physicians’ Weekly. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Parents, More, and elsewhere. She is the author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (W.W. Norton, Jan 2010) and AROUSED:  The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (W.W. Norton, 2018). She holds an MD from Yale, an MS from the Columbia School of Journalism, and an MPH from the Columbia School of Public Health.

November 11: Lauren Michele Jackson

Dr. Lauren Michele Jackson is a contributing writer at The New Yorker who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019). Her work (research, criticism, essays, and – on occasion – poetry) has appeared in The Atlantic, The Awl, Feminist Media Studies, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Paris Review, The Point magazine, Rolling Stone, Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Magazine’s Vulture, and The Washington Post, among other places. She is currently at work on a second book with Amistad Press.

November 18: Sarah Blackwood

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University in downtown Manhattan, and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). She is co-editor of the Avidly Reads short book series with NYU Press, and wrote the Introduction for the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, The Hairpin, and Los Angeles Review of Books as well as American Literature, The Henry James Review, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States. 

December 2: Philip Leventhal

Philip Leventhal is a Senior Editor at Columbia University Press who acquires in Film and Media Studies, Journalism, and Literary Studies. 

ZOOM! Note: the Zoom meetings start at 4 since I'm meeting with my Public Writing students at the Grad Center then, but the speaker events start at 4.30 so you should come then.