PEN Award Winners at Big Umbrella Reading Series

Presented as part of the Big Umbrella Reading Series. Please join us in the East Village for a nonfiction reading to celebrate the PEN Literary Awards with awards winners Sheri Fink, Mark Slouka, and Rob Spillman, and other special guests. 

The Big Umbrella Reading Series is a monthly non-fiction reading series held on the second Tuesday of every month at 2A.

Sheri Fink is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown, 2013) about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a correspondent at The New York Times, where her and her colleagues’ stories on the West Africa Ebola crisis were recognized with the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the George Polk Award for health reporting, and the Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, received a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and a National Magazine Award for reporting. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (PublicAffairs), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Five Days at Memorial was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award, the American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, and the NASW Science in Society Journalism Book Award.

Mark Slouka is an internationally recognized author of six books. Both his fiction and nonfiction have been translated into sixteen languages. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and his essays have appeared numerous times for Best American Essays. A contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine since 2001, his work also appears in Ploughshares, Orion Magazine, Bomb, The Paris Review, AGNI, and Granta. A Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago. He is the 2011 recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for his collection of essays Nick of Time.

Rob Spillman is the editor of Tin House and the winner of the 2015 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing. His memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, will be out from Grove in April, 2016.