Author: Holly Doyel

Michener Fellow Lara Palmqvist Receives Humanitas Screenwriting Award

Michener Center Fellow Lara Palmqvist has been awarded the 2023 Carol Mendelsohn College Drama Award from Humanitas for her feature screenplay, The Garden. The award is one of the annual Humanitas Prizes honoring film and television, which “seek[s] to recognize work that explores the human condition in a nuanced and meaningful way.”

In addition to nine Humanitas Prizes awarded to leading industry professionals such as Craig Mazin, Tyler Perry, and Guillermo del Toro, who all received awards in 2023, Humanitas reserves two prizes annually for student writers in the genres of comedy and drama. The prize includes a monetary award as well as career resources and mentorship opportunities.

Photo by Shannon Cottrell.

“Our judges praised the strong character work, visuals, and thematic writing on display in The Garden, and view [Lara] as a screenwriter to watch in the coming years,” wrote Daniel Plagens, Humanitas Prizes Program Manager.

“We look forward to seeing how her writing craft and her writing career will grow and develop over time; it will surely include a future writing for the screen.”

Photo by Timothy Norris.

 

 

The Humanitas Prizes were celebrated on November 2, 2023, at the historic Avalon Theater in Hollywood. All photos courtesy of Humanitas.

 

MCW Alum Lauren Green Selected for Forbes 30 Under 30

Author Lauren Green (MCW ’21) has been selected for the Forbes Magazine “30 Under 30” Media Cohort for 2024.

From Forbes Magazine: “Lauren Green is a poet and author whose chapbook, “A GREAT DARK HOUSE,” was published by the Poetry Society of America in 2023. Green’s fiction work has appeared in 20 different journals including “American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and Threepenny Review,” and 17 of her poems have been published in outlets like the Poetry Society of America. She is a 2022 Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award recipient and her debut novel, “The World After Alice” will be published by Viking and Penguin Random House in 2024.” – Forbes Magazine

Green’s debut novel, The World After Alice, will be out in Summer 2024.

 

Event: Reading with Carolyn Forché on November 2nd, 6pm

Poet Carolyn Forché will read her work at the Harry Ransom Center, with a reception to follow.

Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Her first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World.

She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.

“Carolyn Forché shows how people survive in an unbearable world.” —Daina Savage

Reserve your seat here.

Event: Reading with Ayad Akhtar on September 26th, 6pm

Author, playwright, and President of PEN America, Ayad Akhtar, will read his latest work, followed by a book signing and reception at the Harry Ransom Center. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What(Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).

Reserve your seat here.

Event: Reading with Megha Majumdar on March 7, 6pm

Author Megha Majumdar will read from her novel, A Burning (Knopf, 2020), which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal.

A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former editor in chief of Catapult books, and lives in New York.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/megha-majumdar-author-reading-and-book-signing-tickets-528586696037

Event: Reading with Victoria Chang on February 16th, 6pm

Poet, writer, and editor Victoria Chang celebrates her most recent book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything, published by Copper Canyon Press and Corsair Books in the U.K. in 2022, with this reading and a book signing at the Ransom Center. The book was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and The Guardian. In the book, Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count.

This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

The Trees Witness Everything will be available to purchase and a book signing will follow the reading.

Seating is limited, please RSVP. This program is in-person only and will not be available online.

Event: Reading with Joy Harjo on November 10th, 7pm

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate in 2019—first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role.

Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. Her many writing awards include the 2019 Jackson Prize from the Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies.

For event information click here.

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