Please join us at american grammar (2046 N. Front Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122) for an evening of readings by Philly-based novels by Philly-based novelists: Emma Copely Eisenberg, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Asali Solomon and Joseph Earl Thomas.
Rothman-Zecher, Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, received a Scholarly Promotion Grant from the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore Libraries for Before All the World: A Novel.
About the novelists:
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the novel Housemates, which was a national bestseller and named a best book of the year by The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, People, NBC, Them.Us, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle. Housemates was also longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and won The Athenaeum of Philadelphia’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her narrative nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl, was a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice as well as a finalist for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Esquire, The New Republic, Lux, The Washington Post Magazine, VQR, and many other publications. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novels Before All the World, which was named an NPR Best Book, and Sadness Is a White Bird, for which he received the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Honor, and which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the winner of the Ohio Book Award, a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, Jewish Currents, Lit Hub, Nashville Review, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, The Paris Review’s Daily, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Moriel is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, and teaches creative writing at Swarthmore College, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing.
Asali Solomon’s latest novel, The Days of Afrekete was called “a feat of engineering” by the New York Times. She is also the author of Disgruntled and Get Down: stories. She was the recipient of a 2022 Pew Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Essence, McSweeney’s, and in several anthologies including The Best Short Stories of 2021: The O. Henry Prize Collection. She is the Bertrand K. Wilbur Chair in the Humanities at Haverford College where she teaches fiction writing, directs Creative Writing and teaches literature of the African Diaspora.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2023), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His prose and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
This scholarly promotion event is sponsored by the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore Libraries.
