Join us Thursday, December 7th, at 7 pm, for the next Columbia Selects reading of the 2023–2024 season!
Our lineup this month:
Jenessa Abrams '17 is a writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Book Critics Circle, MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the New York Public Library, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. Janessa currently teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University.
D.L. Lee '18 is a journalist and career writer with a background in public health communications and political speechwriting. She is the recipient of the bronze medal in the New York Festival, was a finalist for the Prime Ministerial Women & Sports Award for outstanding media coverage, and was an invited speaker at the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting. Her first novel, Sisterly Love, a story of two sisters who grow apart, explores the intertwined issues of sexuality, politics, family, and gender through the relationships and career of the protagonist, Summer O'Flynn. It was a semi-finalist in the 2019 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and the 2019 Hidden River Arts Eludia Award.
Garen Torikian '22 is a fiction writer, essayist, and translator from Western Armenian into English. He has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Garen was also the editor of Mo(a)t, an anthology of translated contemporary Arabic literature, which was published in 2021. His writing has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature, Speak, and Nexus. He is currently at work on his first novel, Exit Codes.
What is Columbia Selects? Columbia Selects is an alumni reading series hosted by the Columbia MFA Writing Program. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you'll be reading in 2025!
Columbia Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke '00 and Emily Austin '10.
Come for the talent. Stay for the camaraderie and cocktails.
For more info send an email to [email protected]
