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  • Ross Gay – Toni Morrison Day Keynote Speaker

    Ross Gay is the author of the poetry collections Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Be Holding (2022), winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award. As an essayist, he has published The Book of Delights, a 2019 New York Times bestseller, Inciting Joy (2022), and The Book of (More) Delights (2023). Gay is founding co-editor of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’ and an ardent gardener and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.

    Visit the Toni Morrison homepage for the complete program: https://www.monmouth.edu/department-of-english/toni-morrison-day/

    Co-Sponsored by the Department of English, Intercultural Center , Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Social Work, Leon Hess Business School, History & Anthropology, Guggenheim Memorial Library, Monmouth Review

    Special thanks to community partner Project Write Now

    Questions can go to english@monmouth.edu

  • Hernan Diaz

    Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

    His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.

    Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO.

    Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

    Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.

  • Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

    Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021),  Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Michael Waters) of Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). She has published scholarship in the field of Romani Studies, on issues of representation, appropriation, exophony and code-switching, and on the works of Kimiko Hahn, Agha Shahid Ali, and Colum McCann. She is the Translation Editor for Plume.

    Moscaliuc has received two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Dairy Hollow, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.

    She is graduate program director and associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and former poetry & translation faculty in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Drew University (New Jersey).

    Michael Waters’ recent books include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), & The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions, 2006) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His co-edited anthologies include Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020) & Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Knopf, 2019). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, includingPoetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, & Kenyon Review. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of five Pushcart Prizes & fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, & NJ State Council on the Arts, Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.

  • Kaitlyn Greenidge

    Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.

  • Benjamin Nugent

    Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity: Stories (FSG, 2020). He was awarded The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize for his fiction, which has been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. He’s written for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently Director of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA at Southern New Hampshire University.

  • E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. A Passage to India hauntingly evokes India at the peak of the British colonial era, complete with the racial tension that underscores every aspect of daily life. Into this setting, Forster introduces Adela Quested and Mrs. Moor, British visitors to Chandrapore who, despite their strong ties to the elusive colonial community there, are eager for a more authentic taste of India. But when their fates tangle with those of Cecil Fielding and his local friend, Dr. Aziz, at the nearby Marabar Caves, the community of Chandrapore is split wide open and everyone’s life—British and Indian alike—is inexorably altered.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Julia Baird’s Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Julia Baird’s Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon. The honest and revealing story of John Lennon’s childhood by his sister Julia. Poignant, raw and beautifully written, Baird casts John Lennon’s life in a new light and reveals the source of his emotional fragility and musical genius. It’s also one family’s extraordinary and powerful story of how it dealt with fame and tragedy beyond all imagining.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. The author’s last novel, it concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, Jewish scientist Nathan Landau, and his lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.