DEEP DIVE POETRY & FICTION

A literary event in the historic PRS library

Featuring readings by:

Amy Gerstler

Jonthan Escoffery

Kai Carlson-Wee

Wendy Chen

Mandy Kahn

André Naffis-Sahely

Annabel Graham

Jacquelyn Stolos

Hosted by Deep Dive, Something Something & Jane McCarthy

Our readers:

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. Index of Women, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.

In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry.

Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. Gerstler has taught writing and/or literature and/or visual art at the University of California at Irvine (where she is a Professor Emerita), California Institute of the Arts, Cal Tech, Art Center College of Design, the University of Utah, Pitzer College, The Bennington College Writing Seminars, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/actor/arranger Steve Gunderson.

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a New York Times and Booklist Editor’s Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and an International Bestseller. If I Survive You was nominated for more than a dozen prizes and awards internationally, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the Southern Book Prize. If I Survive You received American Short Fiction‘s 2023 Constellation Award for a Story Collection and was named Miami New Times’ 2023 Best Book by a Local Author. It was named a ‘best’ book of 2022 by NPR, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, L.A. Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vox, Kirkus, BookPage, Real Simple, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.

In 2023, Jonathan was named among the 36 Forces Shaping the Cultural Conversation by Harper’s Bazaar. He was a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and won The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2020. His story “Under the Ackee Tree” was among the trio that won the Paris Review the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and was subsequently anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Observer, The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Wendy Chen is the author of the novel THEIR DIVINE FIRES (Algonquin Books, 2024) and the poetry collection UNEARTHINGS (Tavern Books, 2018). Her translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux on 2/25/2025 in a collection titled THE MAGPIE AT NIGHT.

Chen is the recipient of prizes and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, MacDowell, & elsewhere. Her writing has appeared widely in prestigious venues such as Freeman's, A Public Space, & Lit Hub. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and adapted into musical compositions. She has taught and spoken at colleges, universities, and arts organizations such as the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Poetry Foundation, & Yale University.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is from Abu Dhabi but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He also co-edited Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015) and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013). He has translated more than 20 titles of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Nation, Harper's, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Playboy, The Spectator, and World Literature Today, among others. He is a lecturer at the University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL from BOA Editions. He teaches poetry at Stanford University, and he has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and The Missouri Review, which selected his poems for their 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. With his brother Anders, he has co-authored two chapbooks, Mercy Songs (Diode Editions) and Two-Headed Boy (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the 2015 Blair Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco.

Mandy Kahn is the author of three poetry collections: Holy Doors (2023), Glenn Gould’s Chair (2017) and Math, Heaven, Time (2014). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry anthology series, have been read on BBC Radio, and have been featured in the national newspaper column American Life in Poetry. She has given readings at Cambridge University, the Getty Museum, MOCA, and the Barrick Museum, has been profiled in the magazines Flaunt, Issue and Malibu, and has been interviewed by The Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s also the subject of Courtney Sell’s feature-length documentary Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn.

Jacquelyn Stolos is a writer living and teaching in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Jacquelyn has won fellowships to attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Community of Writers. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega Magazine, No Tokens, Joyland and more. She is the co-founder of LA's Something Something Reading Series. Edendale, her first novel, was named a literary finalist in the 2020 Forward INDIES Book of the Year Awards. Asterwood, her debut children's novel, is forthcoming from Delacorte Press.

Born and raised in Malibu, California and based in Los Angeles, Annabel Graham is a writer, editor, and photographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, W Magazine, The Sewanee Review, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, and BOMB, among others, and has been supported by the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and Disquiet International. She holds a BA in Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics and an MFA in Fiction, both from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. For eight years, she served as fiction editor of No Tokens, a journal of literature and art. A co-founder and co-host of the acclaimed LA-based literary reading series Something Something, she is also the founding Editor in Chief of The Panafold, a new quarterly print magazine centering around the arts, architecture, design, and culture of California.

Event Venue

Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States