Events

Sarah Lawrence's MFA Dance online information sessions provide perspective students with the opportunity to connect directly with the Program Director, John Jasperse, to learn more about the program and the Sarah Lawrence community. We will introduce you to the program's multidisciplinary curriculum and show how our individualized approach to education can support your artistic development. There will also be an opportunity to discuss the admissions requirements and ask any questions you may have. 

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This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Today in June we are waiting for the Pentagon to say what they haven't said about UFOs, and hearing the virus may indeed have been leaked from a lab. I am thinking about the difference between the stories we trust because we are expecting to hear them, need to hear them, can't imagine beyond them--and the intimate and surprising trust great writers of nonfiction (journalists, but also essayists and fiction writers and poets) inspire. What September will be like I do not know but maybe I will talk about this: toxic narrativity, on the one hand, and on the other, the craft of trust, its mystery across forms and genres, and the deep personal work of becoming trustworthy.

Kristin Dombek’s essays have been anthologized in Best American Essays and elsewhere, and translated across the globe. You can find some in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, Vice, and n+1, for whom she writes an occasional advice column called The Help Desk. She is the author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2016), and has been awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, a n+1 Writer’s Fellowship, a Calderwood Journalism Fellowship, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. She’s taught writing at New York University, Princeton University, Queens College/CUNY, and Queens University of Charlotte, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the MFA program.

Charles Yu will join President Cristle Collins Judd in conversation to kick off this year’s academic event series, which will bear the theme, Belonging. 

Charles Yu is the author of four books, including “Interior Chinatown” (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.

This program is a part of our SLC Reads Program which aims to introduce incoming students to SLC’s academic environment and faculty community, foster an exchange of ideas, and encourage our community to explore perspectives on themes related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. 

REGISTER HERE

This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

If you commit yourself to any serious vocation, and are lucky enough to get to do it your whole life, you're going to need to periodically re-discover, or re-invent, your reasons for doing it. You lure yourself into any difficult undertaking when you're young with certain useful hubristic delusions, but when those dreams fall through—or, worse, come true—you need to find new, truer motivations for doing it.

Tim Kreider is the author of five books, including the essay collections, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. He's contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, medium.com, and many other publications. His cartoon, "The Pain—When Will It End?" ran for 12 years. He taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College for four years and would like to again.

This performance of the Trisha Brown Dance Company is presented in partnership with the Sarah Lawrence College Dance Program and hosted by Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mt. Vernon, NY. The performance features early works of the renowned choreographer, Trisha Brown, and may include participation of Sarah Lawrence College Dance Program Students. This performance is generously supported by the New York State Council of the Arts Restart NY: Rapid Live Performance Grants.

REGISTER HERE

This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

When you hear the word "storyteller," you probably imagine a man with a luxurious white beard, or a woman with elaborate robes and some kind of talking stick. Either way, they sit around a campfire and weave a spell with their words. But we all have a storyteller inside of us all the time — you probably told five stories so far today about little things that happened to you. In this talk, I walk you through how to recognize the storyteller inside of you, and to harness the way you naturally turn lived experience into narrative to make yourself a better writer.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She's also the author of Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She's also the author of Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

There is often a false binary drawn between the writer and reader. The reader wants a confessional and the writer must excavate their lives in order to write an empathetic memoir. In this craft lesson we'll be looking at how do we find the balance between our painful narrative and protecting the reader? And what is our responsibility to our reader?

This craft talk will focus on the complexities of writing nonfiction, how to write trauma ethically, how to write trauma without cannibalizing one's experiences, and how to balance the craft of writing with the craft of writing trauma.

Anna Qu MFA ’12 is a Chinese American writer. She is the author of Made In China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, which The New York Times Book Review calls, "stunning." Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Lithub, Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. Anna serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal, and teaches at the low res MFA program at New England College and Catapult. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

D. Nurkse: BA, Harvard. is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Love in the Last Days, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, The Fall, The Rules of Paradise, Leaving Xaia, Voices over Water, and, most recently, A Night in Brooklyn; poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and six editions of the Best American Poetry anthology series. Recipient of a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and two awards from The Poetry Foundation; a finalist for the Forward Prize for best poetry book published in the United Kingdom. SLC, 2004–. Purchase D. Nurkse’s work here.

Quincy Scott Jones MFA ’15 is the author of the The T-Bone Series (Whirlwind Press, 2009) and the forthcoming How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children (C&R Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, Love Jawns: A Mixtape, and The Feminist Wire as well as anthologies Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. His graphic narrative, “>Black Nerd<,” is in the works. With Nina Sharma he co-created Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC people, featured on Anomaly.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here. 

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the John Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship at the Library of Congress, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and residencies at Villa Serbelloni / Rockefeller Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim award and is a former fellow of the NYPL Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University and received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Critic Megan O’Grady says that "Historical fiction arises out of...the belief that it is possible to tell stories about a vanishing past that bear on the immediate present, forged at the place [where] the archives end and the author’s imagination begins. The desire to hit the pause button — to 'awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,' as Walter Benjamin put it..." What's the appeal for writers of writing from history? What are its challenges? How does one conduct and translate research? How does one negotiate the weight of recorded fact and invention? Who has the right to tell a story? What, if any, is one's obligation to history when writing such fiction?

EJ Levy’s debut novel, The Cape Doctor (Little Brown, 2021), was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Barnes & Noble “100 Best Books of Summer.” It is based on the life of Dr. James Miranda Barry (born Margaret Bulkley in Cork, Ireland, circa 1790) who revolutionized medicine in the English colonies. Editions are forthcoming in France, Spain, and Italy.

Jonathan Lee is an award-winning, internationally bestselling novelist, editor, and screenwriter living in New York. His new novel, The Great Mistake (June 2021), is available for preorder now. Jonathan’s last novel,High Dive, was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, and many other publications.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015, and Quotients, a New York Times New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor's Choice, & Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her short fiction was distinguished in the Best American Short Stories 2016 and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Believer, The Literarian, the Austin Chronicle, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, the San Francisco Chronicle,and Catapult. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. While editor-in-chief of the literary journal Epiphany, she established the Breakout 8 Writers Prize with the Authors Guild. She teaches at Vassar College.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and the Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. She is the author of the critically acclaimedHullabaloo in the Guava Orchardand the Man Booker Prize winning novel,The Inheritance of Loss. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Is there a secret ingredient in great writing, that is not usually discussed? Yes: Irony. What, exactly is Irony, and how can we use it most compellingly?

Suzanne Hoover: B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.A. and Ph.D., Columbia University. Sarah Lawrence College Literature Faculty, 1977-2000; Sarah Lawrence MFA in Writing Faculty, 2008-present.

This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Kaveh Akbar is the author ofCalling a Wolf a Wolf(Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook,Portrait of the Alcoholic(Sibling Rivalry, 2017). Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Kaveh is the founding editor ofDivedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he writes a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX." Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appearin The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His next work, Pilgrim Bell, is forthcoming 2021 (Graywolf).