Please join us on Thursday, February 8th, 6:30 PM in the University Union Potomac Lounge, for an evening with award-winning writer Susan Muaddi Darraj. Darraj’s talk will be followed by a book signing.
Susan Muaddi Darraj is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. She is also a Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program and a faculty member in Fairfield University‘s MFA program. In 2014, her short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007. She edited Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, which was published in 2004. With Waïl Hassan, she co-edited a volume for the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
Susan is a former editor at Barrelhouse Magazine and The Baltimore Review. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Stories, The Orchid Literary Review, Mizna, Sukoon, Banipal, and elsewhere. She is a two-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and has also been awarded a Ruby’s Artist Grant from the Greater
Baltimore Cultural Alliance. She is co-founder of the annual conference, Conversations & Connections: Practical Advice on Getting Published, and speaks often at conferences on topics ranging from Arab-American literature to creative writing to pedagogy.
Susan belongs to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI), the Associated Writing Progams (AWP), and the Modern Language Association (MLA). She currently serves as a Board Member of RAWI and is a professional member of the PEN America Center. She is part of the PEN Faulkner Foundations Writers in Schools Program.
This program is sponsored by the Foreign Languages Department, English Department, Center for Student Diversity, the Asian Studies Program, and the History Department. For questions, email diversityworks@towson.edu.
