Homecoming: Mason’s Alumni Reading
Thursday, September 10 at 7 pm via Crowdcast
About the Event
Come back to George Mason (virtually) this fall as alumni of the Creative Writing MFA Program gather to read selections from their latest prose and poetry. Jessica Anthony’s all-in-one ghost story, love story, and political satire, Enter the Aardvark, explores the secrets we keep from ourselves. In How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together, Dan Kois shares his story of, in his words, “the various ways I screwed it up, and what we learned.” Mystery writer Art Taylor presents a collection of 16 short stories, highlighting twenty-five years of his award-winning work in The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes will read from her new book of poetry, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, wherein she explores what it means to be caught in a cycle of violence. Sponsored by George Mason University Creative Writing.
Reserve Your Spot and Watch the Event
About Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony is the author of The Convalescent (McSweeney’s/Grove) and Chopsticks (Penguin/Razorbill), a multimedia novel created in collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral. Her third novel, Enter the Aardvark, was published in March by Little, Brown in the USA and Doubleday in the UK, and has been optioned for film. Anthony’s books have been published in several countries, and her short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, The Idaho Review and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Maine Arts Commission, and was recently a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy) and the Bridgeguard Foundation (Slovakia). She will spend a month in 2021 living at nearby Mount Vernon, researching her next novel at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. She lives in Maine.
About Dan Kois
Dan Kois is a writer at Slate. He’s the author of How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together (Little, Brown, 2019), the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of “Angels in America” (with Isaac Butler, Bloomsbury, 2018), and the author of Facing Future (Continuum 33 1/3, 2011). He lives in Arlington, Virginia with his family.
About Art Taylor
Art Taylor is the author of the story collection The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense and of the novel in stories On the Road with Del & Louise, winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. He won the 2019 Edgar Award for Best Short Story for “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and he has won three additional Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, three Macavity Awards, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction. His work has also appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, and he edited Murder Under the Oaks: Bouchercon Anthology 2015, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Anthology or Collection. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.
About Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes
Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has appeared in Always Crashing, The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and cahoodaloodaling. She has a chapbook, Patterning, from Corgi Snorkel Press. She is co-host of The Smug Buds, a podcast.