On Wednesday, February 6, award-winning writers Layli Long Soldier and Jacob Shores-Argüello will read from their work as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing. The reading, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Hearst Dance Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton University campus, is free and open to the public. In response to audience feedback, all readings for this year’s series have moved from 4:30 p.m. to a 7:30 p.m. evening time slot.
Poet and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation Layli Long Soldier. Photo by Nancy Nichols
Layli Long Soldier is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Awards. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and is poetry editor at Kore Press. In 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation located in the state of South Dakota. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She earned a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. with honors from Bard College. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Long Soldier will be introduced by Michael Dickman, faculty member in the Program in Creative Writing and author of The End of the West; Flies (winner of the 2011 James Laughlin Award); 50 American Plays, co-written with his brother, Matthew Dickman; Green Migraine; and Brother.
Costa Rican-American poet and prose writer Jacob Shores-Argüello. Photo courtesy of Jacob Shores-Argüello
Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican-American poet and prose writer and currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. His second book, Paraíso, was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Oxford American. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Dzanc Books ILP International Literature Award, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown, the Djerassi Resident Artist’s Fellowship, and the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox, Massachusetts. During his fellowship year he is working on a mixed genre piece focusing on cultural symbols, borders, and climate.
Shores-Argüello will be introduced by Nomi Stone, postdoctoral research associate in Princeton’s Department of Anthropology and author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (2008) and Kill Class (2018), which is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the U.S. military across America.
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 the best contemporary writers. All readings are at 7:30 p.m. in venues in the Lewis Arts complex and are free and open to the public. Upcoming readings scheduled in the 2018-2019 series include Frank Bidart and Yuri Herrera on March 6 in the Donald G. Drapkin Studio, and Han Kang and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on April 17 in the Hearst Dance Theater.
The series will also include readings in May of new work by selected students in spring creative writing courses and readings by seniors in the Program from the novels, collections of short stories, poems or translations, or screenplays written as their senior theses under mentorship by the creative writing faculty.
To learn more about this event, the Program in Creative Writing, and the more than 100 other performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.
