This February, join bestselling and multi-award winning author Jason Reynolds and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Greg Pardlo in conversation for the launch of the 2018 season of PEN Out Loud, presented in collaboration with PEN America and the Strand Book Store. In a candid author-to-author conversation, they will discuss the vital importance of a literary canon that is representative, contemporary, and hopeful, as they speak about craft, interrogate and celebrate each other’s work, and provide insight into their respective relationship with poetry and prose as a means of expression.
Jason Reynolds is crazy. About stories. The New York Times bestselling author is a National Book Award Finalist, a Kirkus Prize winner, a Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. His critically acclaimed debut novel When I Was the Greatest, was followed by The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave As You, and the first two books in the Track series, Ghost and Patina. His recent work includes Long Way Down and Miles Morales: Spider Man. Jason is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program, and currently resides in Washington, D.C.
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, is forthcoming from Knopf.