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2023-24 Visiting Writers

All events free and open to the public.
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Schedule

  • Masha Gessen, September 20
  • Leila Aboulela, October 16
  • Valzhyna Mort, November 15
  • Edwidge Danticat: PEN-Malamud Award, December 1
Image credit Lena Di.

Masha GessenSeptember 20, 8:00, SIS Founder's RoomÌý

Masha Gessen is the author of eleven books, including Ìýand ,Ìýwhich won the National Book Award in 2017. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, LGBTÌýrights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among other subjects, for theÌýNew York Review of BooksÌýandÌýNew York Times. On a parallel track, they have been a science journalist, writing aboutÌýAIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazineÌýVokrug svetaÌýfor refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. In 2017, they became a staff writer at the New Yorker. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York.

Image credit: Rania Rustom.

Leila AboulelaOctober 16, 7:00, SIS Founder's RoomÌý

Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese writer whose work has received critical recognition and a high profile for its depiction of the interior lives of Muslim women and its distinctive exploration of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality. She is the author of six novels:ÌýRiver Spirit, Bird Summons;ÌýMinaret, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year; The Kindness of Enemies; andÌýLyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Aboulela was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her latest story collection,ÌýElsewhere, Home, won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award.ÌýHer workÌýhas been translated into fifteen languages and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize, (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Aboulela grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Aberdeen.

Image credit: Valzhyna Mort.

Valzhyna MortNovember 15, 7:00, SIS Founder's Room

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by The New York Times and NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.

Edwidge Danticat: PEN-Malamud AwardDecember 1, SIS Founder's RoomÌý

Details forthcoming: see website for more information.