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This summer\, the National Book Foundation hits the road for NBF Presents: Summer with the National Book Awards\, br inging National Book Awards-honored authors to libraries across the countr y.
\nJoin us for a conversation with fiction writer Nafissa Thompson -Spires (Heads of the Colored People\, National Book Award Longlister) and poet Monica Youn (Ignatz\, Blackacre\, National Book Award Longlister &am p\; Finalist) on writing diverse female stories\, from girlhood to motherh ood\, that women can actually see themselves in. Free and open to the publ ic.
\nNafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbil t University and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily\, Dissent\, BuzzFeed Books\, The White Review\, and other pub lications. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writi ng at Cornell University. Her first book\, Heads of the Colored People\, w as longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award\, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award\, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize\; was a finalist for the Kirku s Prize\; and has won the PEN Open Book Award\, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction\, and an Audie Award. She is also the r ecipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.
\nMonica Youn is the author of thr ee books of poems\, most recently Blackacre (2016)\, which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also a fin alist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Aw ard\, was longlisted for the National Book Award\, and was named one of th e best books of the year by the New York Times\, Washington Post\, and Buz zFeed. Her book Ignatz (2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow\, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA program s at NYU and Columbia. She is a former lawyer\, a daughter of Korean immig rants\, and is a member of the curatorial collective The Racial Imaginary Institute.
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