Welcome to our sixth year of showcasing literary and artistic excellence in Harlem, USA! I’m thrilled to announce our season opener with three alumni returning with new books and an emerging essayist! Pulitzer-prize winner Gregory Pardlo, Lacy Johnson, Amy Fusselman, and Maya Doig-Acuña will be reading on Sunday, September 30th at Silvana in Harlem from 6:00pm-8:00pm. 300 W 116th St (SW corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass Blvd). Admission is free! Cash bar and dining – but there will be cake! Here is more information about our amazing participants:

Maya Doig-Acuña is a native Brooklynite and graduate of Middlebury College. She is
the nonfiction editor of new literary publication, Double Space Magazine, and has been published herself in Harlem Focus, Latino Rebels, and Duende Literary Journal. She has also received support from Bread Loaf School of English and Tin House Workshop. As a Smithsonian Cultural Heritage Fellow, Maya is currently at work on an oral history project on Black immigrant communities in Washington, D.C. She is a lover of feelings and television shows that make people cry.

Amy Fusselman is the author of four books of nonfiction. Her latest is Idiophone, about which Publisher’s Weekly noted that Fusselman “has transformed the traditional essay into something far wilder and more alive.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Believer, Ms, McSweeney’s, ARTnews, and many other places. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and three children. 

This is Amy’s return appearance at FPP!

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of the essay collection The Reckonings (Scribner, 2018), the widely-acclaimed memoir The Other Side (Tin House, 2014), and Trespasses (University of Iowa Press, 2012). She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.

This is Lacy’s return appearance at FPP!

Gregory Pardlo’s ​collection​ Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.

This is Greg’s return appearance at FPP!

– Stacy Parker Le Melle