Talk: Tales of Two Americas

America is a land of opportunity or is it? Join writer Kirstin Valdez Quade, poet Lawrence Joseph and author and publisher John Freeman as they discuss Tales of two Americas: Stories of Inequalities in A Divided Nation. This collection of short stories, poems, autobiographical texts offers us a framework to look at inequalities in the US in different terms, from different points of views. These humble, powerful, and reflexive voices give space to “stories that reveal how many forces outside of wages lead to income inequalities.”

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH is the author of several collections of poetry, including So Where Are We? (2017) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (2005). His debut, Shouting at No One(1983), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Bookslut critic Nicholas Gilewicz praised Into It (2005), which addresses the events of September 11, as “a very intimate book, one that counterintuitively and productively sidesteps confessionalism.”
As a student at the University of Michigan, Joseph won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. He has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the third recipient of the New York County Lawyers Association’s “Law and Literature Award,” joining prior winners Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He is also the author of the prose work Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About the Law (1997).
He has taught creative writing and law at Princeton University and is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law. He lives in downtown Manhattan.

KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE is the author of Night at the Fiestas, which received the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernica, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. She’s been on the faculty in the M.F.A. programs at University of Michigan and Warren Wilson.

JOHN FREEMAN is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Lit Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Cities, an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York City today. Maps a collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at The New School and is Writer in Residence at New York University.