What Just Happened: Writers Discuss the Post-Election Moment

Join Writers Against Trump for a post-election panel discussion with Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Patricia Spears Jones, Darryl Pinckney and moderater Siri Hustvedt. This program will take place on Zoom. Click here to register.

About Writers Against Trump.
We are writers who have come together to oppose the racist, destructive, incompetent, corrupt and fascist regime of Donald Trump, and to give our language, thought, and time to his defeat in November. We believe that this presidency is uniquely dangerous to our present and future society. Writers Against Trump collaborates with organizations seeking to encourage voter turnout, promote candidates who resist the Trump apparatus, protect the election from fraud and theft, and mobilize in the event of post-election trouble.

Carolyn Forché is a poet, memoirist and activist. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), and What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, The James Tait Black Prize (UK), and the Dayton Peace Literary Peace Prize, and winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and is a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society (1963-64), and an organizer of the first national demonstration against the Vietnam war (1965) as well as a sit-in at the Chase Manhattan Bank against their loans to apartheid South Africa (1965), and many political campaigns since, including opposition to South Africa investments by the University of California and Harvard (1985-87), and to fossil fuel investments at Harvard (2013- ). He served on the board of Greenpeace USA for three years (2003-06). He is the author of eighteen books, including history (The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage), social and cultural analysis, essays, poetry, and four novels, of which the next, The Opposition, set in the 1960s, is to be published by Guernica Editions in 2021.

Patricia Spears Jones grew up in Arkansas and has lived and worked in New York City since the mid-1970s. She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. She is the recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and 3 full-length collections and five chapbooks. At the Rauschenberg Residency, she published Collapsing Forrest City, Photo Giclée. Her poems are widely anthologized and forthcoming in 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today and in journals such as Plume Poetry 8; Cutthroat Journal; alinejournal.com/convergence; The New Yorker and The Brooklyn Rail. She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). She curated programs as Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence. She has taught summer poetry workshops for the Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts, and Wild Seeds Workshop for Medgar Evers College She leads workshops for The Poetry Project, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets and Parachute Literary Arts. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress.

Darryl Pinckney, a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two novels - High Cotton and Black Deutschland - and three works of non-fiction - Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy, and Busted in New York and Other Essays. He has written texts for Robert Wilson's productions of The Forest, Orlando, Time Rocker, The Old Woman, Letter to A Man, Garrincha, Mary Said What She Said, and the forthcoming Dorian Gray. He is at work on a memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six essay collections, seven novels, including The Blazing World and Memories of the Future, and a work of nonfiction. Hustvedt has a PhD from Columbia University in English Literature and an appointment as a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has been awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Prix européen de l’essai from the Foundation Charles Veillon, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.