Zell Visiting Writers Series: Robin Coste Lewis and Elif Batuman

Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is the writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a Cave Canem fellow, and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novel, The Idiot, and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have been anthologized in the 2014 Best American Travel Writing and the 2010 Best American Essays collections. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. Batuman holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2010 to 2013, she was writer-in-residence at Koç University, in Istanbul. She lives in New York.