To celebrate the launch of our winter 2021 special issue on the climate crisis, the Massachusetts Review is pleased to announce a reading with contributors Gina Apostol, Joseph Earl Thomas, Shailja Patel, and Omar El Akkad, alongside guest editors Roy Scranton and Noy Holland.
GINA APOSTOL has published four novels. Gun Dealers’ Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Publishers Weekly named Insurrecto ,one of the ten best books of 2018. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Philippine National Book Award. “At the Hotel Sirena” is an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, La Tercera. She lives in New York City and Hadley, MA.
OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Changed Our World. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July 2021 and is long-listed for the Giller Prize.
SHAILJA PATEL is a queer, radical, internationalist feminist from Kenya, and the best-selling author of MIGRITUDE, currently taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide. Patel’s poems have been translated into seventeen languages and featured in the Smithsonian. Her performances have received standing ovations on four continents. Honored by the Nobel Women’s Initiative with a Global Feminist Spotlight, Patel is currently a research associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and a Civitella Ranieri 2021–23 Fellow.
JOSEPH EARL THOMAS is a writer from Frankford, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Philadelphia Stories, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.
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