A salon-style reading and conversation concerning Documentary Strategies with renowned non-fiction writer, journalist, and novelist Ben Ehrenreich.
Ben Ehrenreich is a widely celebrated non-fiction writer, journalist and novelist. His most recent book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, published by Counterpoint Press, was the winner of a 2021 American Book Award. His previous book of nonfiction, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death and Palestine, was released to wide acclaim in 2016 by Penguin Press. Based on years of reporting from the West Bank, it was dubbed “haunting,” by The New York Times Book Review, “riveting and powerful” by Haaretz, and “elegant and moving” by The Economist. Ehrenreich is also the author of two novels. Ether was published by City Lights in 2011 and was called “brilliant and unforgettable” by Chris Kraus and “real art” by Percival Everett. The Suitors, a much praised re-telling of the Odyssey noted for its “linguistic acrobatics” (Publisher’s Weekly), was published in 2006 by Counterpoint Press.
In 2018 and 2019 Ehrenreich wrote a regular column on the climate crisis for The Nation and in recent years worked extensively in the West Bank, where he began reporting in 2011 and lived from 2013 to 2014. He has also reported from Somalia, Kenya, Afghanistan, Haiti, Cuba, Cambodia, France, El Salvador, Mexico and the US-Mexican border, as well as all over the United States. His articles and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, The New Republic, Harper’s, The Baffler, and theGuardian. He has published short fiction in BOMB, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, and other journals. In 2011 Ehrenreich was honored with a National Magazine Award for feature writing and in 2012 with a PEN Center USA literary award. His work has been translated into Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.
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This spring, Writing Now features readings and workshops with writers whose work is connected to the Creative Writing Program’s concentrations: Image+Text, Documentary Strategies, Writing+Performativity, and Writing+Its Publics. Structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers, the Writing Now Reading Series and Seminar is a required course for CalArts MFA creative writing graduate students that showcases vibrant new modalities for writing that refresh today’s interconnected creative fields.
Writing Now offers inspiring points of contact and critical conversation about writing process and practice between visiting writers, students and local audiences, with an eye for fostering the collaborative, the future-forward, and the unexpected in literature.
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