Raymond Carver Reading Series: Maaza Mengiste, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent novel, The Shadow King, was called “a brilliant novel…compulsively readable” by Salman Rushdie. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places. Maaza’s fiction and nonfiction examines the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile, and considers the intersections of photography, memory, and violence. She was a writer on the documentary projects, GIRL RISING and THE INVISIBLE CITY: KAKUMA.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series features twelve to fourteen prominent writers yearly as part of a large undergraduate class taught by TAs from the Creative Writing Program. The readings have an extended question-and-answer session along with a reading.

Normally these readings take place in Gifford Auditorium on Syracuse University’s main campus and are open to the public, but because of the global-health situation the Fall 2020 Reading Series will be conducted virtually via the videoconferencing platform Zoom. If you are interested in a Zoom invitation to this reading, please contact Sarah Harwell at scharwel@syr.edu.

(Photo by Nina Subin)

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