On Monday evening, Oct. 8, novelist and story writer Shobha Rao will be reading new work as part of Lang’s Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship. We welcome the entire community to join us!

Shobha received her MFA from San Francisco State University. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the recipient of a 2015 Elizabeth P. George Foundation Fellowship. She has twice been invited to the Hedgebrook writer-in-residence program and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. TC Boyle selected her short fiction for the 2015 Best American Short Stories. In a review of her work for the Los Angeles Times, Bethanne Patrick observed, “Shobha Rao writes cleanly and eloquently about women who, without their brightness, might have been left to die in their beds. She writes them into life, into existence, into the light of day.”

The Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship is a semester-long residency in the First-Year Writing Program. The Fellowship honors a writer of considerable achievement, in any genre, whose work also reveals a concern for social justice. The Fellowship was created in honor of Grace Paley, whose commitment to the arts and activism—whose voice—is a model for the writer in our moment.

Date: Monday, Oct. 8, 7p

Location: Wollman Hall, room 500 in 65 West 11th Street, New York City

Free and open to the public. There’ll be refreshments! Books for sale from Posman Books.