Events

Sarah Lawrence College's Office of Undergraduate Admissions will host a college fair for local students and their families from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm on Wednesday, September 27 in the Barbara Walters Campus Center.  Come meet representatives from numerous colleges and discuss college options.

Our Community Reading series returns. Writing Institute students and alumni are welcome to sign up to read for 3 to 4 minutes (or 650 words). All are welcome at this virtual open mic. Readers will be notified at least one week before the event. Come out to share your writing or cheer on your fellow writers! RSVP HERE. 

Westchester’s premier chamber orchestra/ensemble network opens its 7-concert 2023-24 season with masterpieces by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. 

REGISTER HERE. 

Sarah Lawrence College MFA Writing Faculty member Ben Purkert reads from his recently published novel The Men Can’t Be Saved. Book sales and signing to follow.

Ben Purkert is a poet and novelist. His debut novel, The Men Can't Be Saved, came out in August 2023 from Overlook/Abrams. He is also the author of the poetry collection For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018), named one of Adroit's Best Poetry Collections of the Year. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Slate, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A former Guernica editor, he is the founder of Back Draft, an interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, and currently lives in Jersey City.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.

Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in humans and AI systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the 10 best science books of 2009. Her latest book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), has been shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing. This event is open to the entire Sarah Lawrence community and the public.

REGISTER HERE. 

Ticketed event with author Jami Attenberg for Writing Institute community members. RSVP here.

Join us on October 5th to celebrate 40 years of the Writing Institute community!

Bestselling author Jami Attenberg joins us for a special craft lecture on how to carve out a creative life for yourself. This craft talk will be followed by a Q&A with the author, moderated by Denne Michele Norris MFA ’12 and live streamed on Zoom. Please join us afterwards for a reception as we welcome writers from forty years of the Writing Institute community.

RSVP HERE.

A panel discussion about the work of Elizabeth Bonaventura on view at the Heimbold Visual Arts Center, September 7 to October 22. Moderated by Angela Dufresne, with Carrie Moyer, Jennifer Macdonald, Claudia Bitran, Wells Chandler, Chris Wilcox, and Amy DiGennaro. 

Reception to follow.