Category: News

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Tayari Jones

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Tayari Jones “holds the reader from first page to last, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters” (Amy Bloom). The author of four novels and a professor at Emory and Cornell, Jones’ most recent novel, the bestselling An American Marriage, received the prestigious 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list.

A novelist of the highest order, she is also a great literary advocate for the work of others, see most recently her introductions to classic reissues of Ann Petry’s The Street and Delores Phillips’ The Darkest Child. Her NYT review of Stacey Abrams’ new memoir, which we recently posted, and this article, on voting conditions in Georgia evidence her savvy in political analysis as well.

You can read her interview with the Paris Review or this recent profile in Vogue, or this excerpt from An American Marriage.

Jones taught at DISQUIET in 2013 and was scheduled to return as our guest writer in 2020. We hope she’ll be able to join us for our postponed tenth-edition program in 2021.

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Buy An American Marriage here or anywhere books are sold.

Shayla Lawson

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Shayla Lawson “writes like you’re having a conversation with your smartest, wisest, funniest friend and you don’t want it to end.” (R. Eric Thomas). Her new book of essays, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope, comes out today from Harper Perennial, available here and everywhere.

The author of three books of poetry, most recently I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean, and a professor at Amherst College, Lawson’s other projects include curating The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and performing with her band The Oceanographers.

Hear her poem “Pantone 427 U“, read “Forrest Gump“, or hear her read from This Is Major at a Zoom reading for THE ANTIBODY.

Shayla Lawson was scheduled to lead a poetry workshop at Disquiet 2020, and we hope she’ll return for 2021.

 

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A note from the DISQUIET staff

Dear Friends,

As many of you know 2020 was to be the tenth edition of Disquiet. Because of COVID that celebration has been delayed until 2021, and now that the days that would have been Disquieted (June 21 – July 3) are upon us, the saudades have hit hard.

We will have much to say about ten years of DIsquiet at next year’s program, but right now in the US we are in the midst of a long-overdue cultural reckoning with the systems of racism and bias that underpin so much of American society. So we have decided to recognize the Disquiet that would have been by featuring each day the work of one Black writer who was slated to present at Disquiet 2020.

Please read and support them and their work, and consider coming to DISQUIET next year where, scheduling and health codes permitting, you’ll be able to work with them.

Sincerely,

The DISQUIET staff

Good News Roundup: New Writing and Awards

A few news items from our alumni you may have missed:

Scott Edward Anderson was awarded the First Literary Prize from the publisher Letras Lavadas, in conjunction with PEN Azores, for his memoir Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances.

Marilyn Duarte’s essay Echoes of the Three Marias in the Me Too Movement was published in The Longleaf Review.

Vix Guiterrez’s essay Dark Sky City, workshopped at Disquiet 2019, was published in Subtropics.

Jennifer Jean collaborated with Amir Al-Azraki on a translation of “I Sleep in my Inkwell and Wave to the Distant,” appearing in the June issue of Poetry

Two Disquiet alumni, Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Theodore Wheeler, were awarded NEA fellowships for 2020.

Congratulations to all!

 

 

 

 

Out now! A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Sawchyn

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Alysia Sawchyn’s debut book of essays, A Fish Growing Lungs, is available now from Burrow Press!

“At age 18 Alysia Sawchyn was diagnosed with bipolar I. Seven years later she learned she had been misdiagnosed. A Fish Growing Lungs takes the form of linked essays that reflect on Sawchyn’s diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present.”

If it’s stll Wednesday afternoon when you read this, there may still be time to register for Alysia’s online book launch (7pm Eastern) via Zoom.

“An escape into inspiration”

A group of major Portuguese authors have found a way to keep themselves and their readers busy during the lockdown: they’re writing a serial novel, with each writer given 24 hours to respond to the previous chapter.

You can read about the project in The Guardian, or follow the story in English, here.

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