Beatrice @ The Merc: Gitty Daneshvari, Daphne Uviller & Jean Hanff Korelitz

Beatrice.com’s reading series spotlighting debut novelists continues at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction (17 E 47th St.) on Wednesday, March 25, with Gitty Daneshvari (The Makedown) and Daphne Uviller (Super in the City)—and a special appearance by Jean Hanff Korelitz, who’ll be reading from her latest novel, Admission.

The reading begins at 7 p.m., and books will be available for sale during a wine reception afterwards.

Gitty Daneshvari was born in Los Angeles to an Iranian father and an American mother. As a child she talked incessantly, feeling the need to comment on everything around her. While at first charmed by her verbose nature, her family soon tired of the constant commenting. This is how she found writing—it was better than talking since she didn’t even need anyone else to do it with. She currently lives in New York City and yes she still talks too much.

Daphne Uviller co-edited, with Deborah Siegel, the acclaimed anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. She is a former books/poetry editor at Time Out New York, and her reviews, profiles, and articles have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, The Forward, New York, Oxygen, Allure—and Self, for which she used to write an ethics column. A third-generation West Villager, Daphne lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Jean Hanff Korelitz grew up in New York City and attended Dartmouth College. She always wanted to be a writer and was first published at age seventeen, when she wrote an article for Seventeen about her cousin Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road. After college, Korelitz spent four years in England and Ireland, first at Cambridge University and later, with her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon. They moved back to the U.S. in 1987 and now live in Princeton, where Muldoon is a professor of creative writing.

18 March 2009 | events |

Marlon James & the Talented Students of Girls Write Now

Last week, I attended an event for Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring program for New York City high school students, where National Book Award-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed talked about her own love for writing as a young girl and how it led her to history and novelist Marlon James read from his new novel, The Book of Night Women. (I’m a few chapters into it, and it’s absolutely blowing me away.) After all the students and their mentors had shared the pieces they were working on, I asked James a few questions about how he came to the event and what it had meant to him.

“Talk about fearlessness,” he said of the young girls’ work, which was frequently quite powerful, drawing in many cases upon their experiences and their family lives. “When you learn at such an early age the value of truth—and truth doesn’t necessarily mean fact—writing what you’re supposed to write, writing as you’re led and not being [made] afraid by society or taboos and what you ‘should’ and ‘should not’ say… For them to learn that at such a young age, while the rest of us are still struggling with that… I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to write at 20.”

The next Girls Write Now event will be the annual spring reading, held on June 14 with a special appearance by Jean Thompson. The organization could no doubt use help from more adult women writers willing to mentor teenage girls, so if you’re interested, I hope you’ll contact them!

17 March 2009 | interviews |