EVENTS: 2021 - 2022
EVENTS: 2021 - 2022
Elizabeth Weybright
Caxton Club
Virtual
February 4, 2022 @ 4 o’clock
TIM J. LORD is the recipient of the inaugural Apothetae-Lark Fellowship for a writer with a disability and a 2017-18 Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. As a native of the Midwest and a member of the disability community he tells stories of people and communities who are often overlooked on our stages and strives to illuminate ignored and underrepresented perspectives.
His play We Declare You a Terrorist examines the 2002 Moscow Theatre Hostage crisis and the ways in which it changes one of the survivors, leading him down a road of dissent and resistance against the burgeoning dictatorship his home is turning into. The play received a finishing commission from Round House Theatre and will be produced in their 2021-22 season.
As the 2019 Reg E. Cathey Writer-in-Residence at the Orchard Project, he began writing The Hard Price which tracks the effects of our two wars in Iraq on two generations of a family over a decade and a half in North Dakota’s oil country. Using the House of Atreus mythology as a model for the play’s Erekson family, it interweaves the ambitions, atmosphere, and urgency of ancient drama into a familiar, contemporary narrative and asks how denying one’s own human weaknesses can become more disabling than a physical disability?
JOANNA NOVAK's short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2 in 2021. Her third book of poetry, New Life, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in fall 2021. Her debut memoir Contradiction Days will be published by Catapult in 2023. Novak is also the author of the novel I Must Have You and two previous books of poetry: Noirmania and Abeyance, North America. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her essay “My $1000 Anxiety Attack” was anthologized in About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy.
JoAnna Novak
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
November 12, 2021
ELIZABETH WEYBRIGHT recently defended her dissertation in English at the City University of New York. Her project positions women writers as key interlocutors in discourses surrounding acoustic science and musical aesthetics in the period. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles Praxis, Cambridge’s Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series, and The Rambling. During her time at CUNY, Elizabeth has taught a variety of courses in literature and World Humanities at the City College of New York. She has also worked with students and faculty as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at John Jay College and a Teaching and Learning Collaboratory Fellow at Macaulay Honors College. She currently serves as Advisement Project Manager in the CUNY Central Office of Academic Affairs and will teach in Barnard College’s First-Year Writing program in Spring, 2022.
Adam Soto
Caxton Club & Creative Nonfiction Prize Announcements
Alumni Room, Old Main
April 29, 2022 @ 4 o’clock
SHANE McCRAE is the poetry editor for Image and the author of seven books of poetry: Sometimes I Never Suffered; The Gilded Auction Block; In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award, and won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the 2017 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Shane McCrae
Virtual Caxton Club
Friday, May 13, 2022 at 4 o’clock
ADAM SOTO is web editor at American Short Fiction. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former Michener-Copernicus Foundation Fellow. He lives with his wife in Austin, TX, where he is a teacher and a musician. His debut novel, This Weightless World, is out now. His collection of stories, Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, will be released in Fall 2022.
MAGGIE QUEENEY is a writer, artist, and educator. She lives and works in Chicago, where she was born. The author of settler, from Tupelo Press in late 2021, Queeney is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, a Ruth Stone Scholarship from the Ruth Stone Foundation, and an IAP Grant from the City of Chicago. Her poems, stories, and hybrid works have been published widely. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.
Maggie Queeney
Caxton Club & Poetry Prize Announcements
Alumni Room, Old Main
April 8, 2022 @ 4 o’clock
Photo credit: Kelly West
CAITLIN HORROCKS is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selections. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the advisory board of the Kenyon Review, where she formerly served as fiction editor. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the writer W. Todd Kaneko and their noisy kids.
Caitlin Horrocks
Caxton Club & Fiction Prize Announcements
Alumni Room, Old Main
May 6, 2021
Credit: Shane McCrae
NEELA VASWANI is the author of the short story collection, Where the Long Grass Bends; the mixed-genre memoir, You Have Given Me a Country; the middle-grade novel, Same Sun Here (co-written with Silas House), and the picture book, This is My Eye (author and illustrator). She is the recipient of the American Book Award, a PEN/O.Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal, the Italo Calvino Prize for Emerging Writers, and other literary honors. Also an audiobook narrator, she received a Grammy for her narration of I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World, and multiple Audies for other works of fiction and nonfiction.
Vaswani has a Ph.D. in American Cultural Studies. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches in classrooms from elementary to graduate school. She is an education activist in the U.S. and India and serves on the Board of Kweli Journal.
Neela Vaswani
Virtual Caxton Club
Friday, May 20, 2022 at 4 o’clock
He is also working on a radical re-imagining of the Oedipus story in the form of a trilogy of plays set in contemporary Southern Illinois. Over the course of his Lark fellowship, he wrote and developed the plays Down in the face of God, a post-apocalyptic mashup of The Bacchae and Antigone; and On Every Link a Heart Does Dangle; or, Owed, a riff on Oedipus which pushes the title character offstage, replacing him with a young woman with a physical disability who undertakes a difficult quest to discover what’s slowly destroying her hometown. The final play, currently in development, will be I Never Cared for You; or, Lies, which will explore the global refugee crisis via the story of Oedipus’ exiled father.
Other work has been developed and produced at The Public Theater, The Lark, The Kennedy Center, Actors Theatre of Louisville, New Harmony Project, The Playwrights’ Center, Pillsbury House + Theater, Circle Rep, the Summer Play Festival, The Cutout Theatre, The Vagrancy, Barn Arts Collective, and The Working Theater.
Tim studied with Paula Vogel while a resident of Providence, RI, and is a graduate of the MFA Playwriting Program at the University of California, San Diego.
