Registration now closed

Forging Friendships, Creating Community

Find Your Story...Writing with Pride

A fireside chat with novelists Rabih Alameddine and Manil Suri about writing, community, and pride.

As part of Find Your Story, join the Library and PEN/Faulkner Foundation for a special conversation with literary icons Manil Suri and Rabih Allameddine. Moderated by novelist Jeffrey Dale Lofton, the conversation will explore their work as gay novelists and reflections on community and friendship among writers. 

About the speakers

Manil Suri was born in Mumbai in 1959 and is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, as well as three internationally acclaimed novels, The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi. His fiction has been translated into twenty-seven languages, longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, LA Times Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and has won the McKittrick Prize and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among others. He is a former contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, for which he has written several widely read pieces on mathematics, India, and LGBTQ+ issues. He lives with his husband in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art, and the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope, The Angel of History, An Unnecessary Woman, The Hakawati, I, The Divine, and Koolaids, as well as the story collection The Perv. His books have been translated into more than 20 t languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Prize for Fiction, and the 2022 PEN/Faulner Awards, He is co-editing The Penguin Book of the International Short Story and has just completed a new Novel, The True True Story of Raja the Guillible (and His Mother). He divides his time between his bedroom & his living room. 

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt’s Little White House. He calls the nation’s capital home now and has for over three decades. Following an early career in acting, he was keen to use his stage-and-screen-performer’s deep understanding of the art of storytelling in a different way, and t oday, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books—in short, paradise.  Red Clay Suzie is his first novel, a fictionalized memoir written through his personal lens growing up a gay, physically misshapen outsider in a conservative family and community in the Deep South.

About Find Your Story...Writing with Pride 

A Day of Writing and Community at MLK Library Celebrating DC’s LGBTQ Writers.

Find Your Story...Writing with Pride will be a day of workshops, presentations, and author talks focused on DC’s writing community. For World Pride the event will have special focus on LGBTQ writers in the DC area. The day will include panel discussions, informal writing workshops, and a dedicated poetry stage.

Upcoming events