Writing Womanhood: Nafissa Thompson-Spires and Monica Youn

National Book Award Program

Fiction writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires and poet Monica Youn will discuss writing diverse female stories, from girlhood to motherhood, that women can actually see themselves in. Free.

This summer, the National Book Foundation hits the road for NBF Presents: Summer with the National Book Awards, bringing National Book Awards-honored authors to libraries across the country.

Join us for a conversation with fiction writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Heads of the Colored People, National Book Award Longlister) and poet Monica Youn (Ignatz, Blackacre, National Book Award Longlister & Finalist) on writing diverse female stories, from girlhood to motherhood, that women can actually see themselves in. Free and open to the public.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, BuzzFeed Books, The White Review, and other publications. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Cornell University. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize; was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize; and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and an Audie Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.

Monica Youn is the author of three books of poems, most recently Blackacre (2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her book Ignatz (2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia. She is a former lawyer, a daughter of Korean immigrants, and is a member of the curatorial collective The Racial Imaginary Institute.

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