Writers Speak Wednesdays Return with Jessica Soffer
Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak Wednesdays is back and kicking things off with novelist Jessica Soffer on Wednesday, February 25 at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall. The series of free author talks and readings will continue almost weekly through May 6 with appearances from of the literary world’s best and brightest authors and editors, including members of the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program faculty and students.
Soffer, the season’s first speaker, wrote much of her debut novel Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (Mariner Books, 2014) at the East Hampton Library, and it has since been published in eight countries. According to the author, it is a story about “accepting the people we love—the people we have to love and the people we choose to love, the families we’re given and the families we make.”
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots was featured in an NPR segment titled “Hidden Gems: 5 Summer Books That Deserve More Fanfare.” A review in O, The Oprah Magazine described the novel as “breathtaking prose” that “interweaves delectable descriptions of food with a profoundly redemptive story.”
Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City.
The next installment of Writers Speak, on Wednesday, March 4, will feature MFA in Creative Writing and Literature faculty members Ursula Hegi, Susie Merrell, Roger Rosenblatt, Julie Sheehan and Lou Ann Walker.
On Wednesday, March 11, Writers Speak program will feature a panel discussion on publishing, “What’s New in Self-Publishing and Small Presses,” with special guests Sande Boritz Berger, Céline Keating, Judy L. Mandel, and Kamy Wicoff.
Other writers scheduled for the spring series include Alice Fulton on April 1, Patricia McCormick and Mitchell Kriegman on April 15, Roxana Robinson on April 22, and Laura Lippman interviewed by former New Yorker fiction editor Dan Menaker on April 29.
The series’ final Wednesday evening, May 6, will be devoted to “the stars of tomorrow” with readings by students enrolled in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Writers Speak Wednesdays programs are free and open to the public. All readings begin at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton, 239 Montauk Highway.
For more information, call 631-632-5030, visit stonybrook.edu/mfa, check out Writers Speak Wednesdays on Facebook or follow @WritersSpeakWed on Twitter.
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