Come experience Poetry Society's newly opened storefront space in Brooklyn with alumni in the literary arts who will share their work and have a discussion about their careers.

Speakers: Morgan Jerkins '14, Cat Richardson '08, Esperanza Rosales '17, Zach Zimmerman '10

Facilitated by Adrienne Raphel '10.

Dinner Reception will follow.

This event is part of the Arts at Work series, which brings Princeton students and alumni together for speakers and panel discussions, artists’ showcases and social events during the summer. Co-sponsored by the Center for Career Development and Lewis Center for the Arts.

Free and open to all Princeton students (including the Class of 2023).

Details:

• Meet with other students and alumni in NYC. (Students are responsible for their transportation)
• Registrants will be sent specific locations and logistics closer to the event date
• Please honor your registration

Speaker Bios

Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering In Strange Lands, Caul Baby, and the New York Times bestseller, This Will Be My Undoing. She is a two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist and has held editorial positions at ESPN, New York Magazine, and Medium. She holds a Bachelor's in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from Bennington College.

Cat Richardson is a poet, a writer, and an editor. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Four Way Review, among others.

Her reviews and interviews can be found at Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, Pleiades, and The National Book Foundation. She is also the director of content strategy and development at NYU's Office of Marketing Communications. She is the editor in chief of Bodega Magazine and a former poetry editor at Phantom Books.

Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (they/them) is a trans Guatemalan-American artist, born in Guatemala City and raised in Norwalk, Connecticut. Selected plays include Spring on Fire: A Guatemalan Story, Crashing, Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams, and When the Party’s Over (TheatreWorks Next Generation Festival). Esperanza’s plays have been supported by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Roundabout Theatre, Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Stanford Department of Theater and Performance Studies. They have worked with The Public Theater, HBO, United Talent Agency, and are a former Teach For America corps member, having served in Huntington Park, California, as a fifth Grade ELA teacher. Last summer, they formed a collective with other Queer Black and Latinx artists at Yale who were then selected as Producing Artistic Directors for the 2022 Yale Summer Cabaret's season, Summer of Love, the theater's first season ever dedicated to new play productions and workshops by Queer BIPOC writers. Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction, the A. Scott Berg Fellowship for English Research, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference, the Kennedy Center's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and Latinx Playwriting Award. They hold a degree in English Literature from Princeton University. Esperanza's play, Color Boy, will be presented in the Carlotta Festival of New Plays.

Zach Zimmerman is a stand-up comedian, writer, and artist who has performed all over the world. Originally from Southern Virginia and trained in Chicago, he was named one of six TimeOut New York Comic to Watch. His stand-up album “Clean Comedy” debuted on the Billboard Top 10 Comedy Charts and at #1 on iTunes. His critically-acclaimed show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival was named a show to see at the New York Comedy Festival by The New York Times.

Zach’s wriiting has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, The Independent, and The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He’s been featured in video projects by New York Magazine, The Cut, and TimeOut NY, and was a host and staff writer for Scruff’s popular trivia game Hosting.

He is a The Second City Theatricals alum, first-generation Princeton University graduate, and once opened for RuPaul’s Drag Race drag superstar Alyssa Edwards. In Spring 2020, he was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in TV comedy writing.

Jessica Lander is a teacher, author and advocate. She is the author of Making Americans, a comprehensive look at immigrant education as told through key historical moments and court decisions, current experiments to improve immigrant education, and profiles of immigrant youth and schools across the country. (Beacon Press, Fall 2022.)

She is a coauthor of Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success (Scholastic, 2017) and author of Driving Backwards (TidePool Press, 2014).

Jessica writes frequently about education policy and teaching. Her work has been published in print and online including in: The Boston Globe, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Ed Magazine and Usable Knowledge blog, Education Week, Educational Leadership Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet Blog, The National Council for the Social Studies, The 74, and Huffington Post.

Adrienne Raphel is the author of the nonfiction book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them (Penguin Press, 2020), and the poetry collections Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022) and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). Her writing appears in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. Raphel holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an AB from Princeton in English and creative writing. She is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, teaches with the Berlin Writers' Workshop and serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective.