The Center For Fiction And TCG Present STORY/TELLER ARTS: Will Arbery And Chloé Cooper Jones With Leslie Jamison

The Center for Fiction, a 200-year-old literary nonprofit that has created an immersive home for readers and writers in downtown Brooklyn, and Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, will co-present Story/Teller Arts: Will Arbery and Chloé Cooper Jones with Leslie Jamison on April 12 at 7pm ET at The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217, and via livestream. The evening will celebrate the publication of Arbery's play Heroes of the Fourth Turning and the paperback release of Jones's Easy Beauty. Novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison (Make It Scream, Make It Burn) will moderate the discussion.

"We're thrilled to return to The Center for Fiction with this event after the inspiring conversation between Taylor Mac and Laura Collins-Hughes," said Teresa Eyring, executive director, TCG. "We're especially excited to hear a leading playwright like Will Arbery in conversation with writers outside of the theatre sector like Chloé Cooper Jones and Leslie Jamison. These kinds of conversations across art form are exactly why The Center for Fiction is such an ideal partner to advance TCG's conviction that plays are literature."

The event will take place at The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 on Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at 7pm ET. In-person tickets are $5, or $10 for a ticket/voucher which includes a $10 voucher to the bookstore redeemable toward Heroes of the Fourth Turning and Easy Beauty on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event. Learn more and acquire your tickets here. For press tickets, please contact Corinna Schulenburg at cschulenburg@tcg.org.

This event represents the ninth collaboration between The Center and TCG, with past events featuring Jackie Sibblies Drury and Claudia Rankine; Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; Heidi Schreck and Paula Vogel; Sarah Ruhl and Matthew Aucoin; Aleshea Harris and Nissy Aya; Lynn Nottage and Damon Tabor; Martyna Majok and Naveen Kumar; and Taylor Mac and Laura Collins-Hughes. Recordings of many of these previous events are available to view on The Center for Fiction's YouTube channel.

Since its founding in 1984, TCG Books has grown to become North America's largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 19 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on its book list. The book program commits to the life-long career of its playwrights, keeping all of their plays in print. TCG Books' authors include: Annie Baker, Nilo Cruz, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Larissa FastHorse, Athol Fugard, Quiara Alegría Hudes, David Henry Hwang, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Heidi Schreck, Stephen Sondheim, Paula Vogel, and August Wilson. TCG Books events are supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Follow TCG Books on Twitter and Instagram at @BooksTCG.

Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. Heroes of the Fourth Turning premiered at Playwrights Horizons in Fall 2019 and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It won the 2020 Obie Award for Playwriting, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, and the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Playwriting Award. Arbery also won the Whiting Award for Drama in 2020. Other plays include Corsicana (Playwrights Horizons), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (The New Group), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He's currently under commission from Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Audible. He's a member/alum of New Dramatists, The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers Group. His plays have been developed at Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, the Vineyard Theater, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Ojai Playwrights Conference, The Cape Cod Theatre Project, The New Group, EST/Youngblood, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. TV: HBO's Succession and Irma Vep.

Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosophy professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, TIME magazine, and others. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient and, in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and teaches at Columbia University.

The Center for Fiction is a literary nonprofit that brings diverse communities together to develop and share a passion for fiction. Founded in 1821 as the Mercantile Library of New York in Manhattan, the organization is now based in the heart of the Brooklyn cultural district, with a 18,000 sq. ft. facility that offers New Yorkers an immersive cultural experience centered on reading and writing. Throughout the year, The Center for Fiction provides a vast array of public programming, reading groups, and writing workshops. The First Novel Prize and Emerging Writer Fellowships help build literary careers, and KidsRead/KidsWrite programs inspire an early love of reading and writing in public school students with author-led events. In recent years, the organization's programming has expanded to include storytelling in all its forms, integrating music, theater, dance, film, television, and the visual arts into its exploration of the best of fiction throughout history and today.

Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, leads for a just and thriving theatre ecology. Since its founding in 1961, TCG's constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and over 7,000 Individual Members. Through its programs and services, TCG reaches over one million students, audience members, and theatre professionals each year. TCG offers networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the biennial TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theatre people; awards grants and scholarships to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America's largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 19 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH, the essential source for a career in the arts. TCG believes its vision of "a better world for theatre, and a better world because of theatre" can be achieved through individual and collective action, adaptive and responsive leadership, and equitable representation in all areas of practice. TCG is led by executive director and CEO Teresa Eyring. www.tcg.org.