Harman Writing Fellow Program

Launched in the Spring of 2014, the Harman Writing Fellow Program brings acclaimed emerging authors, poets and journalists to Baruch College each semester to conduct a writing workshop with members of Encounters Magazine, Baruch’s literary and arts magazine, and other interested students.

Within an intimate setting, students get to experiment with their writing and receive feedback from the writer, while also discussing issues surrounding craft as well as the business of being a writer. Students receive gift copies of the writers’ books.

The Harman Writing Fellow Program is made possible by a gift from the Harman Foundation, which provides support to enhance the College’s Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program.

Since its inception, the Program has hosted a host of writers across genres: novelists Justin Torres (We The Animals), Tiphanie Yanique (Land of Love and Drowning), and Téa Obreht (The Tiger’s Wife); Nonfiction writer Nina Sharma and Poets Laurie Ann Guerrero (A Tongue in The Mouth Of The Dying), Quincy Scott Jones (The T-Bone Series), and Oksana Maksymchuk (The Voices of Babyn Yar); Wendy Xu (Phrasis), Morgan Parker (Other People’s Comfort Keps Me Up At Night) and Angel Nafis (BlakGirl Mansion); short story writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Heads of the Colored People); and food writer Eric Kim (Korean American).

Check out the bios and more on each writer:

Spring 2022 Harman Writing Fellow Oksana Maksymchuk

A prolific writer and translator, Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk’s work has been featured in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Prarie Schooner, Salamander, and Sugar House Review. She has translated three collections of Ukrainian poetry, her most recent being The Voices of Baby Yar. Maksymchuk holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in 2019.

Joining us over Zoom, Maksymchuk taught a poetry workshop centered on themes of trauma and armed conflict. A Ukrainian-American recently forced to flee from the war in Ukraine, Maksymchuk shared poems inspired by this year’s tragic events and Ukrainian history. To say the attendees were moved is an understatement; Maksymchuk’s reading was heartwrenching and powerful, bringing several of her listeners, this writer included, to tears. Even more astounding was the finesse with which she wrote about sorrow and fear. Part of her mastery of the medium lies in her ability to make raw images and emotions subtle and easy to miss. Much like real life, she allows tragedy to be implicit, which makes it all the more real.

Throughout the workshop, Maksymchuk offered up many pieces of advice for young poets. Some of our favorites:

“Get feedback from everyone. Especially from writers you respect.”

“Always learn; never expect perfection but strive to keep growing and learning.”

“The closer you are to the poem you have created, the more if effects you.”

“Fewer things can go wrong with fewer lines, fewer promises broken, fewer words.”

Fall 2021 Harman Writing Fellow Eric Kim

Eric Kim is currently a staff writer for the New York Times and regularly has recipes featured in NYT Cooking. Many of these recipes call upon his Korean-American background, and the fusion between both cultures. Oftentimes they feature, sometimes historical, sometimes personal, but always written in a style that is wonderfully unreserved and engaging. Kim has also worked as a contributing editor at Saveur, a digital manager at Food Network, a teacher of writing and literature at Columbia and as a senior editor at Food52. While working at Food52, he won over readers with his column “Table For One”, a series of pieces all focused on the joy and catharsis of dining alone. His writing has been featured in The Washington Post and Bon Appétit, and his debut cookbook, Korean America: Food That Tastes Like Home, was released this year.

During the workshop, Kim chose to focus less on his recipes and cooking prowess and more on the nuance and attention to detail required in order to be an engaging food writer. Not only did the attendees learn about the many different kinds of articles requested of a food writer, but Kim also recounted his experiences working for Food Network, Food52 and now the New York Times. He discussed one of his best-known articles, “When I Came Out to My Parents, Kimchi Fried Rice Held Us Together” and pointed out a fantastic trick he uses. Similar to Chekhov’s gun, Kim likes to introduce an image or moment at the start of a narrative, and then concludes with a reference to the image to tie the whole piece together. Funnily enough, in this article the image was “My parents let me walk around the house wearing my cousin Becky’s Pink Ranger costume after she was done with it on Halloween.”

Spring 2021 Harman Writing Fellow Daphne Palasi Andreades

Daphne Palasi Andreades’s debut novel, Brown Girls, was published in January 2022 byRandom House in the US, as well as with publishers in Germany, France, and the UK. Her debut follows a group of young women of color in Queens, NY, and the ways they remain tied to one another, their immigrant families, and their neighborhood. Daphne graduated from Baruch College’s Honors Program in 2015. While at Baruch, she served as Managing Editor of Encounters Magazine, and took courses with Harman Writers Katherine Vaz and Gish Jen, and with Baruch’s own legendary Professor Grace Schulman. She also won three Harman Student Writing Awards. Homeland, the collection of short stories she submitted as her Honors Thesis, won the Kanner Prize for Outstanding Honors Thesis, and Daphne also received the 2015 Susan Locke Award. She went on to complete her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was awarded a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

For more information on the Harman Program and Fellowship, contact Professor Esther Allen.

Esther.Allen@baruch.cuny.edu

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Visit Baruch College’s Digital Media Library to watch full readings by Harman Writers-In-Residence.