The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program will kick off its 2016-2017 Writers in Camden series on Wednesday, September 14th, with readings by Rutgers–Camden alumni Susan Muaddi Darraj and Gregory Pardlo, who is also a new assistant professor in creative writing. 

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of  A Curious Land: Stories from Home,  which was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. The book was published in December 2015 by the University of Massachusetts Press. She is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland, and a Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press. She has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections, including Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Susan is a two-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Gregory Pardlo‘s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His other honors include fellowships from 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 also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf. Pardlo joins the faculty of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden in the fall of 2016. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center’s Multi-Purpose Room.  This event is free and open to the public; registration is required. 

The Writers in Camden series is sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing Program and the National Endowment for the Arts.