Department of English

• Wednesday, March 20, 2019 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Arts Cafe, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

TOM SLEIGH'S many books include Station Zed, Army Cats, (John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Award). He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. His most recent books, published as companion pieces, are The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, and a volume of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin, both published by Graywolf in 2018. Sleigh has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, VQR, APR, Poetry, Threepenny, and elsewhere, and has been widely anthologized in publications such as The Best of the Best American Poetry, the Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and the Best American Travel Writing.

AHMAD ALMALLAH grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and moved to NYC when he was 18 years old. During his time in the US, he obtained a PhD in Arabic and Comparative literature from Indiana University in Bloomington. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND and in theMichigan Quarterly Review and forthcoming in the anthology Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees. He obtained his MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and his book of poems Bitter English is forthcoming in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press.