Worlds Within Worlds: Fiction, Language & Intertextuality, Sponsored by Center for Fiction

Saturday, March 7, 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. ET
Ballroom II, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400

Join two giants of literary fiction for an exploration of multifaceted, compressed prose that is both accessible and rich with nuance, insight, and meaning. Katie Kitamura and Rabih Alameddine’s novels, like those of Sebald, offer complex and unreconciled worlds. In both authors’ work, too, translation—and the untranslatable—works on multiple levels. Come for a craft talk that will open up new avenues of exploration in your work. Moderated by author and scholar Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother); The Wrong End of the Telescope; Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and Koolaids; the story collection The Perv; and one work of nonfiction, Comforting Myths. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the Dos Passos Prize in 2019 and a Lannan Literary Award in 2021. Learn more online at RabihAlameddine.com.

Photo Credit: Oliver Wasow Lores



Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Photo Cred: Clayton Cubitt





Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, PhD, is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, New York, she is professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Photo credit: Lakesha Miner