Raymond Carver Reading Series: Chinelo Okparanta, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer

The Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the Raymond Carver Reading Series.

Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.

​She is a winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award, a 2016 Lambda Literary Award, the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, and a 2014 O. Henry Prize. Her debut short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was cited as an editors’ choice in the New York Times Book Review and was named on the list of The Guardian’s Best African Fiction of 2013. The book was nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award (Young Motivational Writer of the Year), longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the 2014 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature.

​She has published work in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, AGNI, and other venues. In 2017, Okparanta was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Under the Udala Trees is her first novel. Her second novel is Harry Sylvester Bird (HarperCollins/Mariner Books USA, 2022).

All readings take place in Gifford Auditorium. They begin at 5 p.m. and are preceded by a question-and-answer session that begins at 4 p.m. They are open to the public.

(Photo by Obi Umeozor)

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