Stacey D'Erasmo & Jonathan Lethem (2009)

This event happened on November 2nd 2009.

Two innovated literary stylists read from novels set in post 9/11 New York City; D'Erasmo's The Sky Below and Lethem's Chronic City.

Stacey D'Erasmo received a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. from New York University in English and American Literature. From 1988 to 1995, she was a senior editor at the Voice Literary Supplement. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 1995-1997. She created and developed the fiction review section of Bookforum from 1997-1998. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2009. She is the 2010-11 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

She is the author of three novels. Her first novel, Tea (Algonquin, 2000), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, A Seahorse Year (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award. Her third novel, The Sky Below, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January, 2009. D'Erasmo's articles and podcasts have been published in The New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and the Los Angeles Times. She has been a faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in 2007 and 2008.

She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2011, he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College.