A reminder that we’re excited to hold our final Hughes Creative Writing Fellows’ Craft Conversation of the year, between the Belarusian poet and translator Valzhyna Mort and our own Samyak Shertok, at 5:00 on Wednesday, April 3, in the Texana Room of Fondren Library. We’ll be having the reception after the event rather than before for this one, so we’ll get right into the conversation at 5:00.
For this event, our creative writing fellows lead a public conversation about writing with an author whose work they find especially interesting. If you had the pleasure of hearing Afsheen Farhadi speak with the fiction writer Laura van den Berg last semester, you can look forward to another great evening.
We hope to see you there!
Valzhyna Mort is the author of the poetry collections Factory of Tears (2008), Collected Body (2012), and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020). She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast translation prize and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Most recently, Mort co-translated Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield (Deep Vellum, 2022) alongside Hanif Abdurraqib.
Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellow and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is currently the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University.
___________
Richard Hermes
Lecturer
Director, Hughes Fellowships in Creative Writing
Department of English
Southern Methodist University