Writing Events and Information Sessions

Saturday, October 28
12:00 - 3:00 PM
Virtual Open House

Join Director Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Assistant Director Maddie Mori for a virtual info session and Q&A on the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Writing program structure, application process, and overview of events and student life. Afterward, we welcome prospective students to a one-hour sample class in the genre of their choice with graduate faculty members.

Wednesday, October 18
2:00 - 3:00 PM
Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre

Zoom livestream registration: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqd-qsqjkqHdefIY1H115j3qi-IWMU2WxS

How do we come to understand what haunts us as writers — and why? The psychoanalytic term “the unthought known” is at the center of everything I have come to understand about the creative process. What we know in our bones but are unable to think (too dangerous, too scary, too impossible) becomes available to us over the course of a writing life, whether we are writing fiction or creative non-fiction. In this talk I’ll use the trajectory of my own “unthought known” to illustrate the ways in which what we don’t think has the power to shape our work.

Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Both Signal Fires and Inheritance were winners of the National Jewish Book Award. Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani’s book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, has just been reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

Wednesday, October 18
6:00 - 7:00 PM

Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre
Advance Registration Not Required

Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Both Signal Fires and Inheritance were winners of the National Jewish Book Award. Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani’s book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, has just been reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

Tuesday, October 23
2:00 - 3:00 PM

Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre
Advance Registration Not Required

Readings by Patricio Ferrari and Haleh Liza Gafori, followed by conversation between the translators and an audience Q&A. 

Patricio Ferrari is a poet, polyglot literary translator, and editor. His most recent editions and translations include The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018) and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa (with Margaret Jull-Costa; New Directions, 2020). Forthcoming translations include: Verde amargo by Martin Corless-Smith (with Graciela Guglielmone; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Pessoa (with Jull-Costa, New Directions 2023), and Habla terreña by Frank Stanford (with Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023). Additionly, Ferrari's work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southwest Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Buenos Aires Poetry, Perfil, and Words Without Borders, among others. Ferrari received an MFA in poetry from Brown University, a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a PhD. in Linguistics at the Universidade de Lisboa with a dissertation on the prosody of Pessoa’s trilingual poetry. Currently residing in New York City, Ferrari is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as at Rutgers University. He has an ongoing collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization in the city focused on linguistic diversity within urban areas worldwide.

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian/Persian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has maintained and deepened her connection through singing and translating the poetry of various Persian poets. Her book, GOLD, translations of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic. GOLD was released on March 8, 2022 by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics, distributed by Penguin Random House. 

Wednesday, October 25
2:00 - 3:00 PM

Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre
Zoom livestream registration: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pcO-grT4qG9b4Lva5Zxl4nKpNTwruApnf

As the publishing industry diversifies, writers are becoming more and more thoughtful about writing characters outside of their identities and experiences – a process Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward calls “Writing the Other.” Although it is vital to treat marginalized characters with great care, writers often begin the process of “writing the other” with false assumption that our identities – and, as a result, our power within institutions – remain unchanged over time. But what happens when we acquire or discover identities we never knew we possessed after creating characters we mistakenly othered? If shaping stories shapes who we are, how do we contend with the fact that the very process of writing may drastically shift how we identify? Why are we attracted to writing about “the other” instead of writing about ourselves? In this talk, Dr. Mathangi Subramanian will trouble the idea of a fixed other while offering strategies for working with diverse characters in ways that acknowledge the dynamic nature of identity.

Mathangi Subramanian is a neurodiverse South Asian American writer and educator. Her novel A People's History of Heaven was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner and the Center For Fiction First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her middle grade novel Dear Mrs. Naidu won the South Asia Book Award, and her picture book A Butterfly Smile was inducted into the Nobel Museum by economics laureate Dr. Esther Duflo. A faculty member at the Regis Mile High MFA program and guest artist at Denver School of the Arts, she holds a doctorate in education from Columbia University Teachers College.

Thursday, October 26
6:00 - 7:00 PM

Barbara Walters Campus Center Rooms A & B
Advance Registration Not Required

Sharon Olds has written thirteen books of poetry.  Balladz was a finalist for the National Book Award and was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Stag’s Leap (2012) received the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize.  Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Chair at New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Tuesday, November 7
2:00 - 3:00 PM

Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre
Zoom livestream registration: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvcuippzovGNDnTupGqPKf6ank--7Wmjxy

Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of writers–it steals our time, it loosens our thoughts, it clips our sentences. However, like any good enemy, we might benefit from bringing it closer, borrowing the very elements that make it so time-consuming in the first place. In this craft intensive, writers will study excerpts from recent fictions that explore how social media might appear in a variety of texts: as character development, defamiliarization, a formal experiment, a gateway to genre, and more. Generative craft exercises will show writers how to employ these same writing strategies in their prose. For better or worse, social media doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and authors looking to capture the hectic nature of contemporary life can benefit from using elements of social media to texture and intensify their fiction.

Isle McElroy is a non-binary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, was published in September. Other writing appears in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Wednesday, November 8
2:00 - 3:00 PM

Heimbold Visual Arts Center Donnelley Theatre
Advance Registration Not Required

We will start by examining examples of ekphrastic and persona poems in order to generate a group understanding of both. Then, together, we will consider models of when these two modes overlap. I am interested in exploring what this space of overlap makes possible for the poet. This talk aims to examine questions of autobiography, mask-making, and risk, and to provide jumping off points for your own writing practice.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Codjoe is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.