Just Another Arab Jewish Potluck: A Conversation with Writers Fern Kupfer & Joe Geha

Thursday, 27 Sep 2012 at 7:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union

Fern Kupfer will talk about her new memoir, Leaving Long Island. She has published hundreds of articles and columns in newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Parents Magazine. Her books include the memoir Before and After Zachariah as well as the novels No Regrets; Love Lies and Surviving the Seasons, a Jewish Book Award nominee. Her husband, writer Joe Geha, was born in Lebanon and raised in the United States. He is the author of the short story collection Through and Through: Toledo Stories, inspired by his experiences growing up in an immigrant Arab American community, and a new novel, Lebanese Blonde. Geha's fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and was chosen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Arab-American Archive. Both Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha are retired from the Iowa State Creative Writing Program faculty.

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Fern Kupfer's work has appeared a wide range of national publications, including Newsweek, Newsday, Redbook, Family Circle, American Way, Woman's Day, The Women's Review of Books, Writer's Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Parents magazine, Moment, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan and The Des Moines Register. Her essays have been widely anthologized in college texts and popular collections, including Nice Jewish Girls (Plume/Penguin), The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives; and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers on Fairytales (Anchor/Doubleday). She wrote monthly columns, "Mothering " and "A Certain Age," for the Long Island Newsday from 1993-2005. Prior to joining the Iowa State faculty, she did freelance advertising for Impressions, Inc. in Long Island, New York.

Joe Geha is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Epoch, Esquire, The New York Times, The Northwest Review, Homeground, The Iowa Review, Oxford Magazine, The Amherst Review, Kaleidoscope, A Nation's Voice, The New Virginia Review, Growing upEthnic in America, Big City Cool, Homeground, and The Quarterly.

Cosponsored By:

• Creative Writing Program
• English
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)