article by John Rice

The Brooklyn Book Festival is New York City’s largest free literary festival and connects readers with local, national, and international authors and publishers during the course of a celebratory literary week. So you had to know that folks from the QC MFA Program would be all over this diverse event, set on nurturing literary community!

So many people came out to snag copies of MFA Alum Rebecca Suzuki’s award-winning book, When My Mother is Most Beautiful, which is coming out with Hanging Loose Press in the winter. The Loose Translations Award is a collaboration between our program and Hanging Loose, one of Brooklyn’s oldest independent publishers, with the purpose of bringing more translation from across the globe into literary publishing.

Catherine LaSota participated in two events for the festival. Catherine took her new online writing community, The Resort, to her old stomping grounds at LIC Bar (the home of her previous project, the LIC Reading Series) for a discussion on what role community plays in our writing lives, called “What’s Community Got to Do with It?” She also moderated a panel on the Festival Day itself called “Echoes of Artistry,” about authors whose books embrace creativity as a character, with Brendan Slocumb, Catherine Lacey, Idra Novey, and John Wray.

MFA alum Eric Becker was also on the scene for Festival Day, moderating a panel called “History Redux and Myths Retold,” where writers challenge readers to reconsider what we think we know, whether it’s disrupting long-held belief systems or accepted historical narratives. Eric is the long-standing Senior Editor at the international literary journal Words Without Borders, as well as a prolific translator from Portuguese, has been a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, in case you were wondering how he is able to work with esteemed international authors like Carmen Boullosa (The Book of Eve), Leila Aboulela (River Spirit), and Itamar Vieira Jr. (Crooked Plow) with such ease!

This year’s Visiting Professor, Eugene Lim, had an early Festival Bookend event “Choir, Live,” where he was joined by Anelise Chen, Danny Tunick, Donald Breckenridge, and Lisa Chen in an in-gallery performative reading of his chapbook, Choir, a text that brings together ten ranting, delusional, and hallucinatory voices that arise from the exhibition’s underbelly. The chapbook is a newly commissioned text that marks the launch of Long Take, a new tri-annual series of creative writing co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Amant, taking its initial prompts from Amant’s exhibition and public events program.

And, not to be outdone, our long-time professor John Weir had a reading as well! John is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, which is co-sponsored by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and his winning short story collection from Red Hen Press, Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, maps the life of a gay man who has “lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.” You can read more about it here on PEN America’s weekly interview series, The PEN Ten!

When people ask what is an MFA good for, this is exactly what I tell them: the things you learn here are the entrance to a larger literary community, and the more you keep pushing yourself to learn, the more likely you get a chance to see yourself in the same festivals as some of your heroes, or see your books on the same shelves as your professors!