Award-winning author Paule Marshall will introduce three emerging African writers - Uzodinma Iweala, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, and Uwem Akpan - on Thursday, December 7, at 7 p.m., at New York University’s Greenberg Lounge, Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South (at MacDougal Street). Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Paule Marshall’s New Generation Series is the final event in the Fall 2006 Creative Writing Program Reading Series. It is free and open to the public; for further information call 212.998.8816.
Uzodinma Iweala is the author of Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins), which The New York Times called “an outstanding first novel Resonant, beautiful ” A graduate of Harvard University where he was a Mellon Mays Scholar and received a number of prizes for his writing, including the Eager Prize, Horman Prize, Le Baron Biggs Prize, and the Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate thesis, he currently lives in New York City.
Mohammed Naseehu Ali, a native of Ghana, has written a collection of short stories, The Prophet of Zongo Street (Amistad). A graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and Bennington College, he has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mississippi Review, Bomb, and Essence. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Uwem Akpan, from Nigeria, has had two fiction pieces published in the New Yorker’s Debut Fiction issues - “An Ex-mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom.” He recently earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Michigan. Prior to that he served as an English teacher and Vice Principal for University Admissions at Loyola Jesuit College in Nigeria and as a guest priest at Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles in Abuja.
Paule Marshall, who holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at NYU, is a permanent member of the NYU Creative Writing Program faculty; she is also a MacArthur Fellow, a past winner of the Dos Passos Award for Literature, and the recipient of an American Book Award. She is the author of, most recently, The Fisher King. Her other works include Brown Girl, Brownstones; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; and Praisesong for the Widow.
The NYU Creative Writing Program, with faculty members E.L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall, Breyten Breytenbach, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Chuck Wachtel, has distinguished itself for more than two decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. The Reading Series, sponsored in cooperation with the NYU Book Centers, is a vital component of the Writing Program, bringing both established and new writers to NYU.