Emerson Authors Sharing Ideas at Boston Book Festival

WLP Associate Professor Jabari Asim

Emerson College faculty and alumni will represent the school in this year’s Boston Book Festival on Saturday, October 13, in Copley Square, Roxbury, and East Boston. Among the Emersonians taking part are:

Jabari Asim, Writing, Literature and Publishing (WLP) associate professor, MFA Creative Writing program director, and writer of We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival, will participate in a panel on “America’s Original Sin: Racism” at 11:00 am, at Trinity Forum, 206 Clarendon Street. WBUR Senior Editor Maria Garcia will moderate the panel, which includes Brown University scholar Monica Muñoz Martinez and journalist Laura Wides-Muñoz.

WLP Associate Professor, MFA Popular Fiction and Publishing Program Director, and novelist Kim McLarin will interview Tayari Jones, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage, at 11:00 am at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building, 2300 Washington Street, Roxbury.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, MFA ’09, recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and the 2018 Chautauqua Prize for The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, will be presenting at “BBF Unbound: Queering the Canon,” at 12:30 pm in the Old South Guild Room, 645 Boylston Street, and moderating “Memoir: Identity” at 4:15 pm at Emmanuel Parish Hall, 15 Newbury Street.

“Queering the Canon” will be moderated by Cottonmouths author Kelly J. Ford, and feature YA author Sara Farizan, playwright David Valdes Greenwood, and novelist Milo Todd. “Memoir: Identity” presenters include historian Kendra Taira Field, women’s health journalist Catherine Guthrie, and South African writer Sisonke Msimang.

NPR and Buzzfeed best book (Find Me) and Bard Fiction Prize winner Laura van den Berg, MFA ’08 will take part in “Reading Like a Writer: Setting,” at 1:45 pm, at the Boston Public Library, talking about creating a sense of place in her novel The Third Hotel, alongside Robin MacArthur (Heart Spring Mountain) and William Martin (Bound for Gold). Henriette Lazaridis (The Clover House) will moderate.

Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges ’86, LHD ‘16, is taking part in “What an MFA In Creative Writing Can Do for You (And What It Can’t)” at 2:30 pm at Emmanuel Parish Hall, 15 Newbury Street, along with Harvard University Press associate editor and poet Heather Hughes and Lesley University creative writing professor and essayist Janet Pocorobba.

Cheryl Buchanan, MFA ’15, co-founder of Writers Without Margins, will moderate “BBF Unbound: Free Write: A Reentry and Recovery Workshop Experience” at the Boston Public Library Orientation Room on Dartmouth Street at 3:00 pm. Writers Without Margins gives writing workshops to men in post-incarceration and addiction recovery. The panel will give audience members the chance to experience a Writers Without Margins workshop, along with WWM alumni and writers Basem Attia, Zachary Paul, and Mathematics Millionaire X.

Writer, educator, and activist Jaclyn Friedman, MFA ’04 will present at “BBF Unbound: Telling Your Personal Story in a Time of Crisis” at 3:00 pm at the BPL Exchange, 700 Boylston Street. Friedman, author of three books, including Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, named by Publisher’s Weekly as a Top 100 Book of 2009, will join writer/editor and body acceptance advocate Lesley Kinzel.

Senior Writer-In-Residence Lise Haines will take part in “Reading Like a Writer: Character,” moderated by author and writing professor Michelle Hoover, at 3:15 pm at the Boston Public Library. Haines will discuss character development in her most recent novel, When We Disappear, along with fellow panelists Jaap Robben (You Have Me to Love) and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Sketchtasy).

Journalism Assistant Professor Tim Riley will lead a faculty-student trip to the festival, and facilitate a “Mobile Salon” discussion about the day’s panels in the Dining Center at 6:15 pm.