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Literature in the Age of Automated Cognition
November 11, 2024 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Free
The 2024 Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities welcomes Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, returning to Wisconsin after having grown up in Brookfield, Wisconsin.
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which was called “a masterpiece” (Publisher’s Weekly) and “a tour de force” (The Washington Post) and selected by The New York Times as one of its ten best books of the year. His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages.
As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). His play McNeal premiered at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in September 2024.
Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at PEN America, where he served as President from 2020 – 2023. In 2021, Akhtar was named the New York State Author, succeeding Colson Whitehead, by the New York State Writers Institute.
RSVP not required but appreciated at (a clickable link is further down the page labeled “Event Website”):
https://uwmletsci.vbotickets.com/event/Literature_in_the_Age_of_Automated_Cognition/137988
This event is underwritten and supported by the Vilas Trust.
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo