Chet'la Sebree

September 29, 2021, 7 p.m.
Online | For Zoom link, please email lit@american.edu

AU MFA Alumna Chet'la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award, and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and won the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize. For her work, she has recieved fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Delaware Division of the Arts, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Currently, she is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and an assistant professor at Bucknell University.

Fiction Writer Danielle Evans

October 27, 2021, 7 p.m. 
[Location TBA]

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, The Chautauqua Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. She is the 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

The PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony

December 3, 2021, 7 p.m. EST

This rich annual literary event features a presentation by the winning author, a tribute from the Malamud family, and an in-depth conversation between the winner and another notable PEN/Faulkner author.

Charles Baxter will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on Friday, December 3, 2021. Ticket information for the ceremony, which will be open to the public, will be available this fall. ASL interpretation will be provided.

Charles Baxter is the author of six collections of short stories, including There’s Something I Want You to Do, which was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2016; Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (2011); and The Soul Thief (2008). He received the Award of Merit in the Short Story in 2007 and the Award in Literature in 1997 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Rea Award in the Short Story in 2012. He has published six novels, including The Sun Collective (2020) and The Feast of Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and was made into a film starring Morgan Freeman. He has also published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot and edited or co-edited several books of essays. Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis.