America is a land of opportunity or is it? Join writer Garnette Cadogan, poet Lawrence Joseph and author and publisher John Freeman as they discuss Tales of two Americas: Stories of Inequalities in A Divided Nation. This collection of short stories, poems, autobiographical texts offers us a framework to look at inequalities in the US in different terms, from different points of views. These humble, powerful, and reflexive voices give space to “stories that reveal how many forces outside of wages lead to income inequalities.”

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist whose research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. Named by the literary magazine Freeman’s as one of 29 writers from around the world who “represent the future of new writing” in 2017, he writes about culture and the arts for various publications.

He is a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar (2017-2018) at DUSP, and is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. The editor-at-large of Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro), he is at work on a book on walking

LAWRENCE JOSEPH is the author of several collections of poetry, including So Where Are We? (2017) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (2005). His debut, Shouting at No One (1983), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Bookslut critic Nicholas Gilewicz praised Into It (2005), which addresses the events of September 11, as “a very intimate book, one that counterintuitively and productively sidesteps confessionalism.”
As a student at the University of Michigan, Joseph won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. He has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the third recipient of the New York County Lawyers Association’s “Law and Literature Award,” joining prior winners Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He is also the author of the prose work Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About the Law (1997).
He has taught creative writing and law at Princeton University and is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law. He lives in downtown Manhattan.

JOHN FREEMAN is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Lit Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Cities, an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York City today. Maps a collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at The New School and is Writer in Residence at New York University.