As part of our 25th Anniversary Celebration week this September 11-13, we hope you will join us to hear past and present RJF Writers’ Awards winners read from their recent work.
25th Anniversary Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Reading Celebrating Women Writers – A Reading with past RJF Writers’ Awards winners Rachel Aviv, Vanessa Hua, Airea D. Matthews, and Eileen Pollack
Wednesday, September 11, 2019, 7 p.m.
McNally Jackson Booksellers (Nolita)
52 Prince Street, NYC
Admission: Free
Rachel Aviv (’10) is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she often writes about medicine, criminal justice, and education. She was a 2019 New America fellow and a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for a story about elderly people being stripped of their legal rights. She is working on a book about how psychiatric diagnostic language changes who people are expected to be and how they interact with institutions providing care.
Vanessa Hua (’15) is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a novel, A River of Stars (2018), and a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. For two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora. She received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. She works and teaches at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco.
Airea D. Matthews (’16) is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Best American Poets, Callaloo, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Kresge Literary Arts Award and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and The James Merrill House. Her current projects include a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race, and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and a faculty member at Warren Wilson’s MFA program.
Eileen Pollack (’96) is the author, most recently, of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering. Her nonfiction book Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a 2018 movie starring Jessica Chastain and her investigative memoir, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, was published in 2015. Her new novel, The Professor of Immortality, is due out in October 2019.
2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Reading
A Reading with our 2019 winners Selena Anderson, Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Sarah Passino, Nicolette Polek, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Debbie Urbanski
Friday, September 13, 2019, 7 p.m.
New York University Lillian Vernon Writers House 58 West 10th Street (between Fifth and Sixth avenues) Admission: Free