Queens College Evening Readings is one of the most prestigious literary events in New York City. This season will feature renowned playwrights, John Guare, Doug Wright, Lisa Kron, Kia Corthron, Patricia Ione Lloyd, and Monet Hurst-Mendoza; fiction writer Valeria Luiselli; and a special reading by the faculty from the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.

Founded in the spring of 1976 by Queens College professor Joe Cuomo, Evening Readings has presented literary luminaries such as, Edward Albee, Susan Sontag, E.L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, and Jamaica Kincaid, among many others.

“For over 40 years, Queens College Evening Readings has offered our audiences and campus community the opportunity to engage in conversation with some of the most brilliant literary minds of our times. An invaluable educational tool for our students and a staple of Queens College’s arts programming, Evening Readings keeps going strong with the roster for 2018. We look forward to welcoming this season’s playwrights and authors to learn more about their creative process, and discuss timely topics within their work such as immigration and the crucial role of women in American theater,” says Queens College President Félix V. Matos Rodríguez.

The Spring 2018 Evening Readings season will kick off February 27 with Tony Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Oscar nominee John Guare, who will engage in conversation about his career, work, and the theatre world with Time Out New York editor and chief theatre critic Adam Feldman. John Guare is the author of A Free Man of Color, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. He is also the founder and co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review. Feldman is the president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, a position he has held since 2005. He has written for Canada’s Globe and Mail and National Post as well as for Time Out London and Broadway.com, among other publications, and was the contributing Broadway editor for the Theatre World book series.

On March 6, Mexican author Valeria Luiselli—just announced as finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism—will read from her book, Tell Me How It Ends, with commentary about how she came to write it and how it relates to current immigration issues. Named “5 Under 35” by the National Book Foundation and included in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2015, Valeria Luiselli’s works include Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, and The Story of My Teeth, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

On March 13,, Evening Readings will feature a panel discussion on women in American theatre with playwrights Lisa Kron, Tony Award winner for Fun Home; Kia Corthron, Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winner for Drama; Patricia Ione Lloyd, New Professional Theatre’s Emerging Playwright Award winner; and Monet Hurst-Mendoza, 2017 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater and a 2016-2018 Van Lier Fellow at New Dramatists. This panel will highlight the contributions of women to American theatre and address the challenges that female theatre professionals must still overcome to have their voices heard and their work recognized. Support for this event is provided by Matthew Watson in memory of his late wife Marjorie Hecht Watson (Queens College Class of 1964), for her lifelong passion for literature and labor justice.

The Women in American Theatre panel will be moderated by former Newsday theatre critic Linda Winer, who was also chief theatre and dance critic of the Chicago Tribune from 1969-1980, and was a critic for the New York Daily News and USA Today. For many years, Winer was virtually the only female first-string theatre critic in New York and the only woman in the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. That has changed today, but it has been “slow progress,” according to Winer herself, who will be recognized in March with a 2018 Theater Woman Award for her service to the field.

On April 10th, Evening Readings will present playwright Doug Wright with moderator Adam Feldman. Wright earned the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his play I Am My Own Wife. Other stage works include Grey Gardens (Tony Nomination), The Little Mermaid, and War Paint.
On April 17, the faculty in the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation will conduct a reading of their works in progress. They will discuss the creative process and the writer’s life. This event is curated by Queens College professor and fiction writer Maaza Mengiste.
The series takes place at Lefrak Concert Hall and is open to the college community and the general public. Subscription to the whole series is $49; tickets for each session go from $15 to $25. Students get two free tickets with CUNY ID.