Please join us for readings from fiction MFA alums Karissa Chen MFA ’12 and Denne Michele Norris MFA ’12, who will each read from their recently published debut novels, followed by a conversation with MFA faculty member Carolyn Ferrell. Audience Q&A and book sales and signings to follow.
Karissa Chen MFA ’12 is the author of HOMESEEKING, a Good Morning America Book Club pick and Book of the Month pick. She is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, People, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as multiple writing residencies including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.
Denne Michele Norris MFA ’12 is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, was released by Random House in April 2025.
This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register here for the Zoom livestream.