TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2011, 5:45 PM:
A reading and conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri in the Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch College, Room 14-220; co-sponsored by Poets & Writers.

JHUMPA LAHIRI received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was published in the fall of 2003. (A 2007 film version was directed by Mira Nair.) Her most recent book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, received the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the world’s largest prize for a short story collection.

Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Although they have lived in the U.S. for over 30 years, Lahiri observes that her parents retain “a sense of emotional exile” and Lahiri herself grew up with “conflicting expectations…to be Indian by Indians and American by Americans.”

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story Interpreter of Maladies), and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. She was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006. In 2010 Lahiri was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.