The SUNY Ulster Herbert H. & Sofia P. Reuner Library Writers Series is a special program begun in 1998, sponsored by The Ulster Community College Foundation, that brings renowned writers to campus every fall. This is a truly unique opportunity for SUNY Ulster students and community members to hear award winning authors read from their work.

Akil Kumarasamy
 

Tuesday, November 12, 2024    10:15 AM

College Lounge, Vanderlyn Hall

Moderated by Elias Stuhr, Assistant Professor of English

“Kumarasamy is also such an assured writer that you trust her completely, sentence by sentence.” —Los Angeles Times

“Kumarasamy writes with heart, wit, and an unflinching eye about the complexities of family, war, and finding one’s home.” —Sara Novic

“Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent.” —Cathy Park Hong

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the collection Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. The linked story collection reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

Most recently, she is the author of the debut novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and Lambda Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students—living through a drought and at the edge of the war—as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled.

About the novel, Dana Dunham said: “Set in a future of eye scans, carbon credits and advanced AI, Akil Kumarasamy’s new novel nonetheless feels surprisingly like home—even as it tests the boundaries of self and story. Its protagonist, grieving the recent death of her mother, throws herself into translating a little-known Tamil manuscript about 17 medical students who strove to achieve radical compassion during the Sri Lankan Civil War (dating to 1983–2009). This and her other portals to shared experience—the omnipresent television, a new drug that transfers memories—dissolve the barriers of being into a dizzying alchemy of past and present, love and truth, death and memory.”

Kumarasamy’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and other publications. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024-25 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She lives in New York City.