The Althea Ward Clark Reading Series presents Katie Farris and Jamil Jan Kochai

Reading by faculty members Katie Farris, a shortlisted T.S. Eliot Prize poet, and Jamil Jan Kochai, a National Book Award in Fiction finalist.

The Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing annually presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, which provides an opportunity for students, as well as all in the greater Princeton region, to hear and meet outstanding contemporary writers. All readings, which are free and open to the public, begin at 6:00 p.m. at Labyrinth Books, located adjacent to the campus at 122 Nassau Street in Princeton.

Katie Farris’s work appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. Her most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and was included among Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including French, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and she has won several awards, including a Pushcart Prize. She was previously an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech and is currently on the creative writing faculty at Princeton University as an associate professor.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. His book The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing & Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton’s Humanities Council, and Labyrinth Books.