Sarah Cypher
“An Evening with Sarah Cypher” will begin at 6:30 p.m. in McCaskey Lyceum in the Saemann Student Center. Cypher, a queer Arab American writer of Lebanese descent, penned the 2023 novel “The Skin and Its Girl.” The event will include a book reading, discussion and signing, and books will be available for purchase.
“Storytelling was important in my family when I was growing up as a way to stay connected to a family, a place and a culture that even my mother’s generation and most of my grandfather’s generation had lost access to. But those connections were still a kind of intergenerational memory of their life in the Old Country and then in America, especially as our relatives started to move farther away from Pittsburgh for work and marriage.” Cypher told Littsburgh.com.
Cypher also is a freelance book editor. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she was a Rona Jaffe Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, North American Review and others.
“We are so excited to have Sarah on campus for a public reading and to speak to our creative writing and honors classes. Her new novel is in many ways unique because it uses second person narrative — a haunting and deeply emotional way to engage with issues of memory and heritage,” said Zak Montgomery, Wartburg’s Harry and Polly Slife Professor in Humanities.
The Michaelson, Briner & Kildahl Literary Symposium is presented by the Slife Professorship in Humanities with generous support from Steve and Jane Noah and other donors to the MBK Endowment. The event is co-sponsored by the Wartburg College Honors Program and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies.
The symposium was created through a leadership gift commitment from the Noahs and Dale and Judy Goeke in support of an annual event that would bring an author, poet or other literary figure to campus to engage students, faculty, staff and the broader community in activities to stimulate critical thought. It celebrates the legacy of former Wartburg English professors Sam Michaelson (1966-92), K.D. Briner (1966-76) and Phillip Kildahl (1961-77 and 1980-82).