Public Programs And Events

Join us at Wollman Hall for a reading by Diana Goetsch, recipient of the Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship, a semester-long teaching residency in the First-Year Writing Program at Eugene Lang College. 

She's an award-winning poet and essayist whose American Scholar column, “Life in Transition,” she says, was her opportunity to document her coming out as a trans woman “as a service to a battered community.”  Mentored by the great William Zinsser, who also contributed regularly to the American Scholar, Goetsch believes her writing there meant “practicing in a sacred space.”

Diana Goetsch, who has been called “honest, moving, unflinching” and “one of the most comically serious, hip poets we have,” will read from new works of nonfiction and poetry. 

She has published eight collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her teaching credits include higher education in Oklahoma and Kentucky and 21 years in the NYC public schools, where she founded a creative writing program for incarcerated juveniles. 

The Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship is a semester-long residency in the First-Year Writing Program by a writer of considerable achievement, whose work also reveals a concern for social justice. The Fellowship honors Grace Paley, whose commitment to the arts and activism—whose voice—is a model for the writer in our moment.

This event is presented by The New School and Eugene Lang College.