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Tania James' latest novel, Loot, is one of ten contenders for the National Book Award.

The Cheuse Center presents its theme for the year. We present 25 writers, some of whom are visiting America from India and Ukraine. We have Kurdish Iraqi translations, a Russian exile, a Cuban exile's work. Meet our Cheuse Fellows, and local writers from across the world too. Stay tuned and come join us in Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC for more than 10 events this Fall.

"But in her I’ve begun to see something, something impossibly bright and blinding and clear." Read Mason undergraduate Alex Pham's essay on "In-betweenness," and his encounters with Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

Between October 13th and November 5th, the Cheuse Center will host our Annual Writer in Residence in partnership with Spain Arts and Culture. Find events across town and in cities across America listed here for ease of reference.

In lyrical prose, the acclaimed Russian writer Anna Starobinets speaks of her self exile from her native country. "This is the choice I have made. Silence, for me, is the worst."

"Argentina was once named the bookstore capital of the world. With 25 bookstores for every 100,000 inhabitants, it was hard to cross a street and not peek into the windows of book-spine candy shops and collections of old newspapers, or locals reselling browned copies, or outside markets propped by subway stations."

We started the Cheuse Center because we believe that literature offers the opportunity to better understand our world: the different cultures and philosophies that exist across time and space; the political circumstances that impact people’s lives and art. The Center has been an attempt to take this opportunity that literature provides and allow it to shed light on all the beauty and pain of our common humanity.

MFA poetry student Arpita Roy has been selected as the winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Poetry for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. For this highly competitive award, she was chosen out of a pool of 2,500 applicants.

With funds from ArtsFairfax, nonprofit Poetry Daily sends Mason MFA poetry students into the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center to teach poetry to incarcerated youths as part of the Poetry Alive! program. “This new program brings young poet-teachers directly into the lives of young people who want to find language for their own stories and who may want to see those stories and their connections with others in a new light as they move forward,” said Peter Streckfus, a co-director of Poetry Daily.