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Join us for a panel at the Annapolis Book Festival with writers Israel Centeno and Ahmed Naji, moderated by Cheuse Center Director Matthew Davis.

The Cheuse Center is pleased to announce this year’s Travel Fellowship recipients: Kathleen Colvert, Timothy Johnson, and Jace Raymond Smellie. All three winners are second-year MFA candidates in Mason’s Creative Writing program, with Colvert and Johnson focusing on fiction and Smellie focusing on poetry.

On Friday, February 19 at 8:00 EST, please join us for our final conversation of the What Translation Sparks series with Poetry Daily. We have saved a dynamite panel for our final event to be moderated by Mason's own Vivek Narayanan. 

On Wednesday, February 17 at 12:00 EST, please join us to hear a conversation between Khaled Mattawa and Christopher Merrill, as they discuss the ten years since the Libyan Revolution. 

On Thursday, January 21 at 12:00 EST Yasmine El Rashidi will be in conversation about her debut novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer, and her thoughts on Egypt ten years after Tahrir Square with writer, former NPR foreign correspondent, and Cheuse Center Board member Jacki Lyden, in what is sure to be a truly dynamic discussion.

The Cheuse Center and the Middle East Institute's Arts and Culture Center are pleased to mark the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring with a series of monthly talks with leading writers from the region. Ten Years After the Arab Spring, which launches this December, will feature the voices of award-winning writers from Arab Spring countries reflecting on the past ten years through the lens of their writings and personal experiences.

The Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University and Poetry Daily are pleased to announce What Translation Sparks. This series of essays and virtual events will feature seventeen renowned poet-translators writing in English and translating from a wide variety of languages

With the help of the Australian Embassy and the Australia Council for the Arts, we are honored to welcome the Australian writer Tara June Winch.

Watershed Lit: Center for Literary Engagement and Publishing Practice brings under one umbrella the robust and diverse initiatives that have sprouted from the Creative Writing Program since its launch in 1980. The center, which provides an efficient and effective way to articulate the community that these initiatives help cultivate, includes Fall for the Book, Stillhouse Press, the Cheuse Center for International Writers, Poetry Daily, and the Northern Virginia Writing Project, as well as literary journals phoebe and So to Speak. Each entity maintains its own focused mission, governance structure, and budget, but will benefit individually and collectively through more strategic collaboration. Watershed Lit will also foster research by faculty and professional development of students, serving as a catalyst of transformational experiences.

Non-Kiwis, if they know New Zealand lit at all, likely know the stories of Katherine Mansfield, Keri Hulme’s, or the memoirs of Janet Frame...But I’m in love with the country’s contemporary literary scene, which is vibrant, supportive, and self-reliant—a nation of readers, reading books that speak urgently to their country’s past and present.