The C.K. Williams Reading Series is organized by Princeton students in collaboration with Labyrinth Books
Writer Rumaan Alam and four seniors in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University will read from their work at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, October 20 at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street. The reading is part of the C. K. Williams Reading Series, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet who served on Princeton’s creative writing faculty for 20 years.
The series showcases senior thesis students of the Program in Creative Writing alongside established writers as special guests. Featuring student writers Katherine Frain, Rebecca Kahn, Anhar Karim, and Lydia Weintraub, the event is free and open to the public.
Rumaan Alam’s novel Rich and Pretty (2016) was named a Best Book of 2016 by Esquire, Refinery29, and Nylon. His latest novel, That Kind of Mother, will be published in 2018.
His stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Meridian, and elsewhere. His other writing or a range of topics has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Buzzfeed, the New Republic, Elle, and other places. He studied writing at Oberlin College and currently lives in New York with his husband and two children.
The four seniors, who are pursuing a certificate in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study, will read from their senior thesis projects. Each is currently working on a novel, a screenplay, translations, or a collection of poems or short stories as a part of a creative thesis for the certificate. Thesis students in the Program in Creative Writing work closely with a member of the faculty, which includes Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, Kirstin Valdez Quade, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Susan Wheeler, and a number of distinguished lecturers.
The Program in Creative Writing also presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series on Wednesdays on the Princeton campus. Upcoming guests include Hilton Als, Hoa Nguyen, Alaa Al Aswany, Linda Gregerson, Osama Alomar, Luc Sante, Jane Hirshfield, and Walter Mosley.
