Survival Instincts: First-time Novelists on the Ties That Bind: Ayana Mathis & Justin Torres (2014)

On February 24, 2014 authors Ayana Mathis and Justin Torres, graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, read from their debut novels from the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre stage in Survival Instincts: First-time Novelists on the Ties That Bind: Ayana Mathis & Justin Torres, as part of the PEN/Faulkner reading series. A reception and book signing followed the reading.

Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, her first novel and a New York Times Bestseller, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.

Justin Torres

Justin Torres is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His first novel, We the Animals, was described in Vanity Fair as “a gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart." His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. He is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.