Join us for a reading with authors Na Zhong, Rocky Halpern, Valerie Kipnis, and Charlotte Slivka, MFA writing program graduates and winners of the Bette Howland Prize. The evening will be introduced by Brigid Hughes, editor of A Public Space which rediscovered Howland (1937-2017), and moderated by Honor Moore.

The Bette Howland Prize is given every year for excellence in nonfiction writing to a graduating nonfiction MFA student at the New School. It was founded in 2017 by Honor Moore to recognize the work of graduating nonfiction concentrators and named for Bette Howland (1937-20l7) a memorist and fiction writer who had mentored Moore in her twenties and with whom she had lost touch.

Howland published four books and gained major recognition in the late 1970s, including a MacArthur Grant, before falling into obscurity. Still alive but suffering from dementia, Howland was rediscovered in 2016 by Brigid Hughes, editor of A Public Space Literary Projects, who picked up a copy of W-3, her memoir (1974) on a sales cart at Housing Works and set about to revive her, publishing Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (a new compilation of stories), W-3 the memoir which was her first book (1974), and Things to Come and Go, (collection of novellas, 1983).

The Bette Howland Prize, which is been given five times and winners are chosen by a significant nonfiction writer from outside the New School Writing Program community, who remains anonymous until the prize is announced. Past judges have been Alexander Chee, Emily Bernard, Amitava Kumar, Patricia Hampl and Deborah Levy. The winner receives $500 and the winning text is considered for publication on the website of A Public Space, which has published all five winners.

Rebekka Rafnsdóttir, 2018, ( b. 1987 ) is an Icelandic writer and a filmmaker based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Her work is rooted in philosophy and literature, although you will find traces of all creative arts in her work.

Na Zhong, 2018, is a fiction writer based in New York. A 2021-2022 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, she has published with Guernica, Carve, A Public Space, Lit Hub, among others. She is also a 2021 alumna of the Tin House Summer Workshop, a 2023 Periplus finalist, and a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart nominee.

Rocky Halpern, 2019, (he/they) is a Brooklyn based writer, sex educator, witchy transsexual, and tenderhearted Pisces rising. He works with LGBTQ homeless youth and recently won first place in a writing contest for his short story Fairy Boy Flight.

Valeriya Kipnis, 2021, who also goes by Valerie, was born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn. She recently returned from her 2022 Fulbright to Ukraine... which she spent in Poland. There, she worked on a documentary project with displaced children from Ukraine, centred on memory and place. She currently works for This American Life, and before that she was an Emmy-award winning reporter covering national and international news for Vice. She is a graduate of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and The New School's MFA Program in Nonfiction Writing. There, she was awarded the 2021 Bette Howland Nonfiction Prize by judge Emily Bernard. She's currently working on her first book of essays about immigrants, the former Soviet Union, Brooklyn, and language. Her literary work debuted in A Public Space in July of 2021.

Charlotte Slivka, 2022, a poet and nonfiction writer, is at work on a hybrid memoir of which her Bette Howland prize-winning essay, March 12, is a part. Her poem Above Ground is forthcoming from Ohm Magazine