Events Calendar

Zachary Lazar and Layli Long Soldier will read from their work at 8 pm on Thursday,  November 1^st in the Frank Conroy Reading Room.

The author of four novels and a memoir, Zachary Lazar’s work creates nuanced, complex fictions out of real world events. Of Lazar’s latest novel Kiese Limon writes: “More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation.” Of his 2009 memoir Nick Flynn says: “Zachary Lazar has managed an amazing feat—to evoke both Joan Didion’s fierce intelligence and Truman Capote’s eerie ability to enter into the unknown.” A graduate of the Writers’ Workshop, Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Layli Long Soldier is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In the Los Angeles Review of Books Mark Trecka writes: “Long Soldier is preoccupied with a particular type of language: the language of history’s ironic answers…Her project is to interrogate that language, and to draw attention to how bodies undergo that language.” In The New York Times, Natalie Diaz writes: “Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues.” Long Soldier received her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her MFA from Bard College. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship, a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a 2016 Whiting Award. She is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.