A reading by John Keene and moderated Q&A by Julie Iromuanya. Refreshments will be provided.
John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), which received a 2022 Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and is longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Prize; and Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.
Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters; Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing), and the Georgia Review. She is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. She is at work on a second novel, A Season of Light. julieiromuanya.com
Literary Arts Lab is a three-day festival of readings, panels, and Q&As featuring writers Eula Biss, Jennifer Croft, John Keene, Suketu Mehta, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan.
This event is sponsored by UChicago’s Program in Creative Writing and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
