Event details

Associate Professor of Creative Writing Katie Farris, a multi-Pushcart Prize winning poet shortlisted for the T.S. Elliot Prize, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Jamil Jan Kochai, a National Book Award in Fiction finalist, read from their work to open the 2026-27 Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series.

This event is cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts and Labyrinth Books. At the event, authors’ books will be available to purchase and have signed.

About the Authors

Katie Farris’s work appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. Her most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, was published in April 2023 by Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize, and was included among Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including French, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and she has won several awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Farris is also author of the poetry collection A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving and the hybrid-form text boysgirls. She is the co-translator of many books of poetry, including Letters of the Alphabet Go to War (2026) by Lesyk Panasiuk, which she translated with Ilya Kaminsky. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Princeton.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton.

Admission

The reading is free and open to the public; no tickets required.

Directions

Get directions to Labyrinth Books, located at 122 Nassau Street in Princeton.

Accessibility

Labyrinth Books is an accessible venue. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.