PEN Literary Quest: Westbeth Edition

The residents of Westbeth Center for the Arts open their homes to Festival-goers for this perennial fave. Grab a map and wander through the hallways of New York City’s oldest and largest artists’ community for salon-style readings and discussions by Festival authors.

Thursday, April 28, 2016, 6:30pm

Westbeth Center for the Arts, 55 Bethune Street, New York, NY 10014

With Dalia Betolin-Sherman, Héctor Aguilar Camín, Lorea Canales, Miriam Celaya, Álvaro Enrigue, Saleem Haddad, Yuri Herrera, Andreï Makine, Karim Miské, Mark Nowak, Alexandre Vidal Porto, Susanna Reich, Fatima Shaik, Burhan Sönmez, Abdellah Taïa, Jorge Volpi, Klaus Wivel

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members and students with valid ID. Purchase tickets here.

Co-presented with the Westbeth Artists Residents Council

All proceeds benefit the Westbeth Artists Residents Council

Sponsored, in part, by the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Consulate General of Denmark in New York and the Danish Arts Foundation, Seven Stories, Other Press, OR Books

Participants:

Dalia Betolin-Sherman
Dalia Betolin-Sherman was born in 1979 in Ethiopia. At the age of five she traveled by foot through Sudan and immigrated to Israel with her parents and sister. Betolin-Shermanhas a bachelor’s degree in social work and a master’s degree in Hebrew Literature. Her debut collection of short stories, When the World Became White was published in 2013. Betolin-Sherman is the winner of the Minister of Culture award for debut writers as well as the Ramat Gan debut fiction award.

Héctor Aguilar Camín
Héctor Aguilar Camín is a journalist, writer, and historian. His first novel, Morir en el golfo (Death in Veracruz), was adapted for cinema and in 1988 he won the Mazatlán Prize for Literature with the book Un soplo en el río [Blowing on the River]. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Gabriela Mistral Medal for Educational and Cultural Merit, and Mexico’s Cultural Journalism National Award.

Lorea Canales
Translates:
Castillian, English, Spanish
Lorea Canales is a novelist, translator, journalist, and lawyer. Her first book published in English, Becoming Marta, was released by AmazonCrossing in 2016. She received a degree from Georgetown Law, and worked and taught in Washington, DC, and Mexico before joining the newspaper Reforma. In 2010, Canales obtained an MFA from NYU. Her novels Apenas Marta (2011) and Los Perros (2013) were published by Random House/Mexico.

Miriam Celaya
Miriam Celaya was born in Havana in 1959, and belongs to the generation whose lives have been torn between disillusionment and hope, whose members reached adulthood in the controversial year 1980. Celaya has a degree in Art History from the University of Havana. She has been a Spanish literature and language professor and worked for over 20 years at Cuba’s Institute of Anthropology. Celaya began her career in citizen journalism in 2007 through her personal blog SinEVAsion and is currently a collaborator for 14ymedio.com, an independent digital news outlet in Cuba.

Álvaro Enrigue
Álvaro Enrigue was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University. He is the author of the novels La muerte de un instalador; El cementerio de sillas; and Vidas, perpendiculars; and the short story collections Virtudes capitales and Hipotermia. Enrigue was born in Mexico and lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Valeria Luiselli.

Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad was educated in Jordan, Canada and the U.K. Born in Kuwait to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, Saleem is an aid worker, researcher, and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He currently works with Saferworld as a Conflict & Security Advisor, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa. Previously he has worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres, Jordan University’s Center for Strategic Studies, and the Overseas Development Institute’s ALNAP network. His short fiction has appeared in Project Pen and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes. He currently lives in London.

Yuri Herrera
Yuri Herrera received his BA in political science at UNAM, his MFA in creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his Ph.D. at Berkeley. His novels have been translated into several languages. He has taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte. He currently teaches at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Andreï Makine
Andreï Makine is a Russian-born French author whose notable works include Dreams of My Russian Summers, which won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis, and his most recent novel, Brief Loves That Live Forever. In 2011, Makine confirmed suspicions that he had published four books over the course of a decade under the pseudonym “Gabriel Osmonde.”

Karim Miské
Born in Abidjan to a Mauritanian father and a French mother, Karim Miské grew up in Paris before leaving to study journalism in Dakar. He has since returned to France, and is making documentary films. Arab Jazz is the author’s first novel. Published in 2012, it won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the Prix du Goéland Masqué.

Mark Nowak
Mark Nowak is the author of Shut Up Shut Down and Coal Mountain Elementary. He is a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock (2015), and a Lannan Literary Fellow (2015). A native of Buffalo, Nowak currently directs both the MFA Program at Manhattanville College and the Worker Writers School at PEN American Center.

Alexandre Vidal Porto
Alexandre Vidal Porto was born in São Paulo. A career diplomat, Harvard-trained lawyer and human rights activist, he writes a regular column for Folha de S. Paulo. His fiction has appeared in some of the most respected literary publications in Brazil and also abroad, and he is widely considered a leading figure in Brazil’s “New Urban Fiction” movement. Sergio Y., winner of the Paraná Literary Prize for best novel, is his English language debut.

Susanna Reich
Susanna Reich’s books include Fab Four Friends: The Boys Who Became the Beatles, Minette’s Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat, José! Born to Dance, and the forthcoming Stand Up and Sing: The Story of Pete Seeger. Among her honors are the Tomás Rivera Award, an International Latino Book Award and an Orbis Pictus Honor. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Fatima Shaik
Fatima Shaik is co-chair of the CYAB Committee. Her new collection of short stories is What Went Missing and What Got Found. A New Orleans native, she is writing a narrative history of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle, an organization founded by free men of color in 1835, and which remained on the same block in Trémé until the 1950s.

Burhan Sönmez
Burhan Sönmez was born in Central Anatolia and grew up speaking Kurdish and Turkish. He studied law in Istanbul and lived in political exile in Britain. In 2011, he was awarded the Sedat Simavi Literature Prize for his second novel, Sins and Innocents. He is the Prize’s youngest recipient. Sönmez lectures at the Middle East Technical University on literary theory. Translated from the Turkish by Umit Hussein, his latest novel, Istanbul Istanbul, debuts this spring from OR Books.

Abdellah Taïa

Abdellah Taïa is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco. Though Moroccan, he has lived in Paris for the last eight years. He is the author of Mon Maroc and Le rouge du tarbouche, both translated into Dutch and Spanish, and the novel An Arab Melancholia, forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in 2011. His latest novel, Le jour du Roi, was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. Taïa has also appeared in Rémi Lange’s 2004 film The Road to Love.

Jorge Volpi
Jorge Volpi is a Mexican novelist and essayist. In 1999 he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize for In Search of Klingsor, the first part of his Tetralogy of Power. His last novel, Las Elegidas, was the origin of the opera Cuatro Corridos, and the film Las Elegidas. His works have been translated into 25 languages. He is the director of the Festival Internacional Cervantino.

Klaus Wivel
Klaus Wivel was born in Denmark. He has been a staff writer since 1998 for the cultural weekly Weekendavisen, which is considered to be among Scandinavia’s most prestigious papers. The English translation of his book The Last Supper: The Plight of Christians in Arab Lands is forthcoming in the spring of 2016 from New Vessel Press.