Join us in conversation with visiting Queens College professor Nicole Dennis-Benn and MFA Alum Rajiv Mohabir, hosted and moderated by Queens College professor and author Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. This event is co-sponsored by the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation.

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of HERE COMES THE SUN (Norton/Liveright, July 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award winner. Her bestselling sophomore novel, PATSY (Norton/Liveright, June 2019), is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Financial Times Critics Choice, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book, and a Today Show Read With Jenna Book Club selection. PATSY has been named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, TIME, NPR, PEOPLE Magazine, Washington Post, Apple Books, Oprah Magazine, The Guardian, Goodhousekeeping, BuzzFeed, ELLE, among others. “Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness,” raves Time Magazine; and NPR names Dennis-Benn “an indispensable novelist”.

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three collections of poetry: Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021), The Cowherd’s Son (Winner of the Kundiman Prize, Tupelo Press 2017), and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize, Four Way Books 2016). He also translated I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) received the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021) received the Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

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OFF THE PAGE: Conversations with Writers is a Queens College series produced by Kupferberg Center for the Arts, the Department of English, the Provost’s Office, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. It is curated by QC professor and author Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.

Photo by Jason Berger.