Conversations in Craft and Content: Joseph Earl Thomas

Arizona State University presents "Conversations in Craft and Content," a creative writing lecture series hosted and moderated by Mitchell Jackson, Guggenheim fellow, Pulitzer winner, and the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor of English at ASU.

The series brings lauded writers to ASU for lectures on the ideas in their work, as well as their writing and revision process and the philosophies that guide them. This fall, we welcome fiction writer and memoirist Joseph Earl Thomas in a hybrid event on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, at 6 p.m. AZ/MST (6 p.m. PDT / 7 p.m. MDT / 8 p.m. CDT / 9 p.m. EDT). 

The free, public event takes place in person at ASU's Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Durham Hall 602 and online via Zoom. 

About the guest

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of "Sink," a memoir, which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the novel "God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer," longlisted for the Center for Fiction first novel prize, and the forthcoming story collection "Leviathan Beach" (Grand Central, 2025). His prose, poetry and criticism have been published in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, Late Light, and The Cleveland Review of Books. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program, he also earned his PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

About the moderator

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel "The Residue Years" received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His other honors include fellowships, grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere.

Jackson’s nonfiction book "Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family" was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by 15 publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews and Buzzfeed. His next novel "John of Watts" will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jackson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire. His most recent book is "Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion," a coffee-table book on NBA style, published in 2023. He is the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at ASU.