Pen on Fire Speakers Series

Join us for an evening of conversation about the art, craft, and business of writing with Susan Straight.

SUSAN STRAIGHT has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, Between Heaven and Here, and A Million Nightingales.  She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Magazine Award.  She is the recipient of the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story, the O. Henry Prize, The Lannan Prize for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Granta, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Harper’s, and other journals.  Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, and Russian. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family. Her new book is a memoir called In the Country of Women. Here’s a review of her memoir in the current New York Times Book Review.

Join us for an evening of with novelists Janet Fitch and Leland de la Durantaye.

Janet Fitch is the best selling author of the White Oleander, an Oprah’s book club pick, translated into 28 languages and the subject of a feature film; Paint it Black, widely translated and recently made into a film directed by Amber Tamblyn; The Revolution of Marina M. an epic novel of a young woman’s coming of age during the Russian Revolution, and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, the novel that resumes the story of Marina M. Her short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and journals such as Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Los Angeles Noir, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Real Simple. She teaches frequently—most recently at the Esalen Institute and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where she will be in residence this summer. Her popular Writing Wednesday writing tip videos can be found on her author Facebook page. For more about Janet, check her website, www.janetfitchwrites.com.

Leland de la Durantaye is a writer, critic, translator, and professor of comparative literature. He has taught at the École normale supérieure and Harvard University and is currently Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a DAAD fellow, a Mellon fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a fellow of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. De la Durantaye is the author of three books and over eighty articles on topics in philosophy, French literature, German literature, Italian literature, anglophone literature and the visual arts. His translation of Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged was a finalist for the PEN Best Translated Book of 2012. His nonfiction books are Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), and Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (2016). His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, The Believer, and other newspapers and magazines. He serves on the editorial boards of the Harvard Review and Cabinet. His first novel, Hannah versus the Tree, was published by McSweeney’s in November 2018.