2017 Festival

Nonfiction prize recipients Maya Jasanoff and Ashleigh Young talk with Briallen Hopper about fact-based writing and the imagination. Briallen Hopper ’s book of essays on love and friendship is forthcoming...

Professor of Classics Emily Greenwood talks with André Alexis, Marina Carr, and Carolyn Forché about how they approach myth in their work. Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where...

Erna Brodber looks at African textiles from the Yale University Art Gallery collection and discusses the use of fractals in her most recent novel, Nothing's Mat . Moderated by Caroline...

Nonfiction prize recipient and Yale alumna Maya Jasanoff ( GRD '02), who spent much of her time as a student at the Yale Center for British Art, considers the work...

The 2015 film Poetry of Witness documents the struggles of six contemporary poets–survivors of war, torture, exile, and repression–to give voice to their experiences with the complex realities of memory,...

The Beinecke’s original manuscript of modernist masterpiece The Heart of Darkness will be on display during this discussion of Conrad’s life and work. Introduced by Kevin Repp, curator of Modern...

Poetry prize recipients Carolyn Forché and Ali Cobby Eckermann speak with Richard Deming about poetry's capacity to give voice to the local, the personal, and the political in a globalized...

Prize Director Michael Kelleher talks with André Alexis, Erna Brodber, Ike Holter, and Ashleigh Young about how and when and why they started writing, and the greatest challenges they have...

André Alexis’s 2016 novel The Hidden Keys was inspired by the classic adventure tale Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This wide-ranging discussion, moderated by curator of Modern Books and...

Marina Carr and Ike Holter discuss playwriting, stagecraft, dialogue, drama, and more with Professor of English and Theater Studies Marc Robinson ( MFA '90, DFA '92). Marc Robinson is Professor...

In conversation with novelist Min Jin Lee ( YC '90), Erna Brodber, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Maya Jasanoff, and Ashleigh Young explore the various ways that writers discover their ancestors and...

Carolyn Forché and David Kim ( LAW ’17) engage with German artist Anselm Kiefer’s 2001 painting Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn) . David Kim is a graduate of Yale Law School,...

Marina Carr considers the connections between William Blake and Anglo-Irish figurative artist Francis Bacon in a conversation with Erica Wachs ( YC '18). Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art.

Erna Brodber and Claudia Rankine discuss the annual Emancipation Day celebrations in Woodside, Saint Mary, the rural community in the hills of northeast Jamaica where Brodber was born and continues...

Ali Cobby Eckermann and artist Natalie Ball talk with Adrienne Keene, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, about Indigeneity and the landscape of contemporary art...

The Age of Trump has changed political discourse in this country, perhaps forever. Legendary New York editor Erroll McDonald ( YC '75) talks with André Alexis, Carolyn Forché, Ike Holter,...