Event details

Multi-award-winning writer Jamel Brinkley, winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and O. Henry Prize and finalist for the National Book Award and Joyce Carol Oates Prize, reads from his work along with several creative writing seniors. The C.K. Williams Reading Series showcases senior thesis students of the Program in Creative Writing with established writers as special guests. Brinkley’s books will be available to purchase and have signed.

This event is cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts and Labyrinth Books.

About the Author

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/4th Estate), winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories (2018, Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. Brinkley was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation and Loghaven Artist Residency (Aslan Foundation). Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Brinkley divides his time between New York and Iowa City, where he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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.