The following is a recording of live readings and interviews with Jay Deshpande and Gint Aras. Jay is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books), named one of the top debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers. A Kundiman fellow, he has held residencies at the Saltonstall Arts Colony and the Vermont Studio Center and was selected for the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award by Billy Collins. Poems have appeared in Boston Review, Sixth Finch, the PEN Poetry Series, Poem-a-Day, Prelude, and elsewhere. Essays and reviews have been published in Slate, The New Republic, The Millions, and Publishers Weekly. He holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia. More information about him can be found at http://www.jaydeshpande.com/
Gint is a writer and Columbia University MFA (SOA 02). To support his writing, he has worked as a teacher, editor, translator, actor, cook and hearse driver. His writing has been compared to the work of such diverse voices as Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, Betty Smith, Nelson Algren and Dostoevsky, among others. His most recent novel, The Fugue, took him almost sixteen years to complete and place, but it was finally published this year by Chicago's Tortoise Books. It's a cross-generational family epic that deals with a community of WWII refugees living outside Chicago, and a young sculptor incarcerated for murdering his parents. Gint will be doing a reading at Guerrilla Lit in Dixon Place, New York on March 30th at 7:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public. More information about him can be found at https://gint-aras.com/
