The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University presents a reading by award-winning poet and writer Franny Choi along with Lillian Chen, Jesús Martinez, Jeremy Pulmano, Rodrigo Pichardo Urbina, and Emily Yin – five seniors in Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. The reading is on April 7 at 6:00 p.m. (EDT) and concludes the 2020-21 C.K. Williams Reading Series showcasing senior thesis students of the Program alongside established writers as special guests. The series is named after the late Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet C.K. Williams, who also served on Princeton’s faculty for 20 years. The reading will be presented via Zoom and is free and open to the public.
Award-winning poet and writer Franny Choi. Photo credit: Qurissy Lopez
Franny Choi is a writer of poems, essays, and plays. She is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. A former news editor at Hyphen Magazine, she co-hosts the podcast VS alongside fellow Dark Noise Collective member and current 2020-22 Princeton Arts Fellow Danez Smith. Choi is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College. In 2020 she was selected as the latest recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton.
The five seniors, who are pursuing certificates in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study, will read from their senior thesis projects. They are among 24 Princeton seniors who are pursuing certificates in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study. Each is currently working on a novel, a screenplay, translations, or a collection of poems or short stories as 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 award-winning writers Michael Dickman, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Daphne Kalotay, Christina Lazaridi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Susan Wheeler, Monica Youn, and a number of distinguished lecturers.
All the seniors in the Program will read from their final thesis work on April 28 and 29, and select students in spring creative writing workshops will read their recent work on April 20.
Patrons in need of access accommodations in order to participate in this event, are asked to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least two weeks in advance of the event date.
To learn more about the reading series, the Program in Creative Writing, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.
