A Literary Arts faculty member and an alumna have been short-listed for the 2021 National Book Awards. Professor Laird Hunt is among five finalists in the fiction category for his novel Zorrie, from Bloomsbury Publishing, and Desiree Bailey (MFA '15) is short-listed in the poetry category for What Noise Against the Cane, published by Yale.  Professor Emeritus Forrest Gander was long-listed in the poetry category for his book Twice Alive, published by New Directions.  

Winners will be announced on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Jay Gao MFA '22 reports that his debut poetry collection, Imperium, has been accepted for August 2022 publication by Carcanet Press.  Associate Publisher John McAuliffe says that Imperium is "refreshing in its use of classical antecedents (Homer, Ovid, Sappho) as it addresses both our present moment and the continuing impacts of trauma."

Karan Mahajan explores the evolotion of India's Bollywood traditions in an article recently published in the New York Review of Books. As noted in the article's precis, "realistic depictions of religions, sexuality and politics have been off-limits in Bollywood for decades, but in recent years, directors were able to bypass censorship by moving to the small screen." Karan Mahajan is an Assistant Professor in Literary Arts, with a primary focus in ficiton.

Chibuihe Obi Achimba has been selected by the St. Botolp Club Foundation as an Emerging Artist of 2021. Chibuihe Obi Achimba is a current MFA candidate in Literary Arts, with a projected graduation date of spring 2022.

Francesca Mari tackles the question of how the United States might address the gun violence in an article appearing in the 10 June 2021 edition the New York Review of Books.

Mark Baumer's selected works, published as The One on Earth, will be released by Fence Books in May 2021. Baumer graduated in May 2011 with an MFA and was indefatigable in his literary practices, writing in every imaginable style, focusing on any and everything. He was on a nation-long trek to raise awareness on climate change when in December 2016 he was struck and killed by a motorist.

Thalia Field, professor of Literary Arts and faculty director of the Brown Arts Initiative, will give presentations on 21 May (2 pm EDT) and on

“Translation,” a digital artwork by Professor and Chair of Literary Arts John Cayley, is currently featured in “Mapping Multilingualism,” a virtual exhibit created by the Center for Language Studies at Brown.  “Translation” is a  work of ambient time-based poetics that makes use of short textual extracts from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’ and passage

Generative Unfoldings, an exhibit sponsored by MIT in spring 2021, features 14 generative artworks, among which is a collaborative project by Qianxun Chen and Mariana Roa Oliva, both of whom graduated from Brown's MFA program in 2020. Their project, Seedlings_: From Hummus, was selected for inclusion by the exhibition curator, Nick Montfort, who is a professor of digital media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.