Last Sunday, near the beginning of her 3:30 p.m. writer-in-residence reading in the Hall of Philosophy, Vi Khi Nao gave a short Vietnamese lesson using only the word emblazoned across the podium at which she
As she wrote and researched coastal communities represented within Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush found herself following the rampikes. Coupled with the lyric essays that fill her book are her own
Maggie Smith Maggie Smith’s greatest professional success hinges on a cycle of grief. Her poem “Good Bones,” which Public Radio International proclaimed the “Official Poem of 2016,” went viral during the tumultuous year — a year
Vi Khi Nao Vi Khi Nao adapts to a room’s energy. As the Writers’ Center prose writer-in-residence for Week Three, Nao prefers to let a community dynamic take the lead when outlining the plans for
When Clara Silverstein was 6 or 7 years old, her father gave her his old manual typewriter. At age 8, she began publishing The Doggie Gazette, a newspaper that covered the life and times of
Before she began her Sunday reading in the Hall of Philosophy as the Writers’ Center Week Two prose writer-in-residence, Jessica Bruder showed off the stripe that now gilds new copies of her 2017 book Nomadland:
David W. Blight David W. Blight does not remember learning about Frederick Douglass in high school. As a college student in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the current director of the Gilder Lehrman Center
Beth Macy To keep track of the web of themes, communities and multiple sources that overflow in her 2018 book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, Beth Macy papered her office
Brandon Som Brandon Som credits his devotion to poetry to a couple of things. One: Like many budding young writers, he was lucky enough to have a few “great” English teachers in high school. And
Jessica Bruder A self-proclaimed “ephemera hoarder,” prose writer-in-residence Jessica Bruder thinks that stuff — photographs, clothing, souvenirs — is a useful way to theorize about the ties that bind. That’s why she has asked her
“Content dictates form,” preaches Stephen Sondheim, Broadway’s peerless wordsmith. Sometimes, content can dictate the forum, too. Debuted last season, the Poetry Makerspace has moved from the Colonnade to the Hultquist Center, taking its current occupant
Bob Proehl Bob Proehl is tired of seeing himself in the narrative. A native of New York and author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds and The Nobody People, Proehl will deliver a Brown Bag lecture at
John Keene speaking on Ocatavia Butler's book When John Keene first picked up a copy of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred at Boston’s Avenue Victor Hugo Books, he was in his early 20s and a young
Dan Egan Dan Egan may not be writing about a subject that “jumps off the shelves,” but he still gets recognized. The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Death and Life of The Great
Broadcast in all-caps at the top of her website, a quote from award-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones sums up her oeuvre in her own words. “I see my work as forcing us to confront our
In 1909, a 5-year-old boy worked a fruit stand in front of his uncle’s Blue Front Restaurant. On Nov. 11, 1909, he watched his town in Cairo, Illinois, lynch two men. In 2006, Martha Collins,