Lara Vapnyar moved from Moscow to Brooklyn in the 1990s. Knowing very little English, she quickly picked up the language and soon began writing in it. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She is the author of two short story collections, There are Jews in My House (Anchor, 2003) and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (Anchor, 2008) as well as four novels, Memoirs of a Muse (Vintage, 2006), The Scent of Pine (Simon & Schuster, 2014), Still Here (Hogarth, 2016), and Divide Me by Zero (Tin House Books, 2019). She lives in New York City with her family.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.

This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.