An Evening with Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri
In celebration of the the Brooklyn Waldorf School library, Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri will read from their respective works Freedom, and Unaccustomed Earth.
This event sponsored by The New School Writing Program will be moderated by Sean Wilsey, author of Oh, the Glory of it All.
Bio
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen was born near Chicago in August, 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College, in 1981, he studied at the Freie Universitat in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Mr. Franzen is the author of three novels - The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), The Corrections (2001) - a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), and a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, and the National Book Award (for The Corrections) in 2001. He writes frequently for The New Yorker, and he lives in New York City.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in England to Bengali parents. Her books include
the collections Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies,
which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the novel The Namesake. Parts of all three were first published in
The New Yorker. Last year, she was appointed to the President's
Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Robert Polito
Robert Polito holds a doctorate from Harvard University. He is director of the New School Writing Program and author of Doubles (poems), Savage Art: A Life of Jim Thompson (winner of Natl. Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar), A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, and At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry.
He is co-editor of Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson and editor of Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Polito is therecipient of Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill fellowships, and his poems and essays have been featured in Best American Poetry of 1991, Walk on the Wild Side: American Urban Poetry Since 1975, the New Yorker, and other publications. He is a contributing editor to BOMB, Pequod, and the Boston Review.
Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey's writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, and McSweeney's Quarterly, where he is the editor at large.
Before going to McSweeney's he worked as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, a fact checker at Ladies' Home Journal, a letters correspondent at Newsweek, and an apprentice gondolier in Venice, Italy. He was born in San Francisco in 1970 and now lives with his wife, Daphne Beal, and his son, Owen.