The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh St, Bethesda, MD 20815
October 17, 2025, 7pm
Readings in honor of Percival Everett, featuring Sam Ashworth, Madison Smartt Bell, and Afabwaje Kurian, and a response by Percival Everett.
Registration Required.
This annual event occurs on the Friday evening before the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival day (which is on a Saturday).
Come hear readings in honor of this year’s award winner. Engage with other readers, writers, and patrons of the arts in suburban Maryland’s rich and storied literary landscape.
Samuel Ashworth is a professor of creative writing at George Washington University. His work appears in The Washington Post, Longreads, Eater, Gawker, and many others. He lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, DC. His debut novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney, was released this year.
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels. Soldier’s Joy (1989) received the Lillian Smith Award; and All Soul’s Rising (1995) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. He has also published two collections of short stories, Zero db 1987) and Barking Man (1990), and biographies of Toussaint Louverture (2007) and Robert Stone (2020). His most recent work is the novel The Witch of Matongé (2022). Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York, Haiti, Paris and London and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B 1979) and Hollins College (M.A. 1981), he has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. He taught creative writing at Goucher College from 1984 to 2023, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires.
Afabwaje Kurian is the author of the novel Before the Mango Ripens (2024), which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Callaloo, swamp.pink, The Bare Life Review, and Joyland Magazine. She’s taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, for the International Writing Program, and for The Writer’s Center.