The Rona Jaffe Foundation/NYU Creative Writing Program Graduate Fellowship 15th Anniversary Reading Podcast Co-sponsored with NYU Thursday, October 6, 7 p.m. Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10th Street, NYC 10011
Celebrating fifteen years of partnership between The Rona Jaffe Foundation and the NYU Graduate Creative Writing Program. Readings by four MFA fellowship alumni recipients: Elaine Hsieh Chou, Marissa Davis, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, and Julia Pierpont. The Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship is given annually to an incoming first-year female MFA student at NYU. This sponsored program among others is part of the Foundation’s ongoing effort to create opportunities for emerging women writers at critical junctures in their literary careers. Elaine Hsieh Chou (RJF Fellow, 2017) is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2021 NYFA Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Disorientation, was published by Penguin Press in 2022 and her short story collection Where Are You Really From is forthcoming in 2024. Marissa Davis (RJF Fellow, 2019) is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Rattle, West Branch, Mississippi Review, Muzzle Magazine, and Best New Poets, among others. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, and The Offing. Her chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020) was selected by Danez Smith for Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize, and she was the runner-up of the 2021 Narrative 30 Below Contest. Sasha Debevec-McKenney (RJF Fellow, 2018) is a poet who studies the presidents. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Granta, Peach Mag, Underblong, and elsewhere. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Julia Pierpont (RJF Fellow, 2010) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Among the Ten Thousand Things, which received the Prix Fitzgerald in France, as well as The Little Book of Feminist Saints. She is at work on a new novel and lives in Los Angeles.