Book launch & showcase: the Alan Cheuse Fellowship at the Arts Club
Thursday, May 15, 2025 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
The Arts Club, 2017 I St. NW, Washington
On May 15, 2025, the Cheuse Center will be at the Arts Club again! The Arts Club is at 2017 I St. NW, Washington DC.
At the heart of the Cheuse Center is the fellowship in Alan Cheuse's name. Said Alan Cheuse:
Live as much as you can, read as much as you can, and write as much as you can
Alan Cheuse’s hope was for American writers to step out into the world, and to bring the world to America through books. This is the main focus of the Cheuse Center.
Presenting George Mason MFA graduates who went on travel fellowships with the Cheuse Center, with published books that emerged from these travels. These writers will read from their new books at a public reading, the evening will mark the ninth year anniversary of the Cheuse Fellowship. The event is accompanied by a food and wine reception sponsored by the Cheuse Center.
Arrivals: between 6 & 7pm.
Reading: 7pm
Food and wine reception & book signing: 8pm
ABOUT THE AUTHORS & THEIR BOOKS
SAMUEL ASHWORTH: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY
Samuel Ashworth has been a bartender, a dancer, and a reporter. He has gutted seafood in the back of Michelin-starred restaurants and assisted with autopsies in a Pittsburgh hospital. His fiction and nonfiction appear in the Washington Post Magazine, Longreads, Eater, Hazlitt, Gawker, the Rumpus, and so on. He is a professor of creative writing at George Washington University, and assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. Sam was one of two inaugural travel grants given by the Cheuse Center for MFA students. Sam traveled abroad to France in order to research the French culinary industry for an upcoming novel about a middle-aged American chef who learns his trade in France. To do so, he spent a week as working as a stagiaire (trainee) in a Michelin-starred restaurant in a town in Provence called Lourmarin. By working 14 hour days cleaning out fresh squid, or cleaning the walk-in freezer, Sam had hoped to understand just how a stagiaire lives, a crucial point to his novel. However, after a week, he “began to spend less time working, and more time observing another kitchen and interviewing people. And in so doing…actually learned much more about what it is to be a chef.” You can find Sam’s full interview here on the Cheuse website HERE. A native New Yorker, he now lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, DC. He is on Twitter and Bluesky at @samuelashworth.
CAROL MITCHELL: WHAT START BAD A'MORNING
Carol Mitchell is the author of the novel What Start Bad a Mornin’ and of 18 books for children, three published by HarperCollins UK. She holds an MFA from George Mason University where she is a Cheuse Center fellow and traveled to São Paulo, Brazil in 2018 to research Lebanese migration to the Caribbean and South America. She is also a fellow of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She hosts and produces the Moonshine Murmurs podcast by Stillhouse Press. Her book reviews and short stories have appeared in several journals. She is an assistant professor at George Mason University in Virginia and is always working on one novel or another. HERE is her interview with 2025 Cheuse Fellow Klara Kalu.
YOUR HOSTS FOR THE EVENING:
LIESEL HAMILTON
Liesel Hamilton is the author of a forthcoming collection of lyric nature essays from the University Press of Florida. She is the co-author of Wild South Carolina (Hub City Press, 2016) and has been published in Audubon, Bellevue Literary Review, Catapult, and The Normal School, among other publications. Liesel was an inaugural winner of the Cheuse Center's International Research Grant: the Cheuse Fellowship. She has an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD from Florida State University. She currently teaches at the University of Florida.
LEEYA MEHTA
After spending a decade at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., down the road from the Arts Club, Leeya Mehta is now the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center and teaches at George Mason University. In 2024, Mehta received the Faculty Civic Excellence Award for her work within the classroom, and the curation of the collaborative 13-month long Baldwin100 project that celebrates the centennial of James Baldwin's contribution to the contemporary imagination: imagining a world that deepens our individual humanity. The project collaborated with 16 DMV organizations to produce over 28 events and exhibitions featuring dozens of visual artists, musicians and writers. Read more about the Center’s work here: https://cheusecenter.gmu.edu. Leeya is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry collection A Story of the World Before the Fence “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history,” writes Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia. In 2022 her work was anthologized in the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Work, an anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press. Her novel, Extinction, is forthcoming.
