A Celebration of the Axinn Foundation Fellowships
A reading and conversation by NYU Creative Writing Program Axinn Fellows Amir Ahmadi Arian, Hafizah Augustus Geter, Raven Leilani, and Jasmin Sandelson, followed by a reception/signing.
Co-sponsored with NYU’s Graduate School of Arts & Science.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here.
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While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters, they stay home if they feel sick, and masks are always welcome.
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The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House is not currently wheelchair accessible.
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Amir Ahmadi Arian has published several works of fiction and nonfiction in Persian. In English, his short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, London Review of Books, and elsewhere. His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperCollins in 2020. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University, New York.
Photo by Jason Keith
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is winner of the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, winner of a 2023 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick, and a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize.
Called "one of 2020's buzziest poets" by Marie Claire, Hafizah is also the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American from Wesleyan University Press (September 2020), received a Starred Review from Publisher's Weekly. It was nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.
Hafizah holds a BA in English and economics from Clemson University; an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago; and an MFA in nonfiction from New York University where she was an Axinn Fellow in Creative Narrative Nonfiction.
Hafizah is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit where she represents a diverse range of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction writers. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York where she is at work on several projects including WOMEN & WEATHER, as well as her second nonfiction project, BEING AROUND: ON LIVING, and a novel about supercontinents and migration.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, the Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, the Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.
Photo by Nina Subin
Jasmin Sandelson is the author of My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood (University of California Press). Her work also appears in The Georgia Review, Longreads, Hobart, and elsewhere. Her next project is a personal reckoning with family mythology, intergenerational trauma, and the many facets of inheritance.
Photo by Anya Broido