An Afternoon with Fiction Writers Jai Chakrabarti & Carolyn Ferrell in person at HVWC

Join us for an afternoon of fiction as two local writers share their most recent work with us in person at HVWC. Masks are strongly encouraged for the duration of the event. Tickets are free but donations towards the writers’ honoraria are appreciated.

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, Feb 2023). His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the novel, Dear Miss Metropolitan (July 2021), a finalist for the both the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Her short-story collection Don’t Erase Me, received the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. She has received grants from the Fulbright Association, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), the City University of New York MAGNET Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Ferrell’s stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other places. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.

About A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness:

Throughout, the characters’ most vulnerable desires shape life-altering decisions as they seek to balance their needs against those of the people they hold closest. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision.

About Miss Metropolitan:

Like Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.