Literary Arts Series | Bergen Community College

The Literary Arts Series is a project designed to encourage intercultural understanding and literacy in the classroom and broader community. The series is coordinated by Dr. Jessica Datema, and Professor Brian Cordell of the Department of Composition and Literature is an associated member.

Each year, we select an individual author for study on the campus by students and colleagues, as well as friends from the larger community. We then invite an author to discuss their work with the audience at an annual speaking event. Pedagogical materials, including biographical information, reviews, excerpts, discussion questions, and other curriculum items are prepared and put up on our site. These materials are made available to support individual readers and teachers who use the author’s work in their classes as a part of varying curricula. We mentor many students who read and study the novels so that they will have the opportunity to speak about and to the author’s work. Our community of readers includes alumni, faculty, BCC students, the school of continuing education, library reading groups, high school students, and the public. We have never charged for the annual event and entry is free.

The original mission of the project was to establish a broad-based community of readers. This ambition was first conceived by a group of ambitious librarians in Seattle—which the English department here at BCC has been able to continue and extend. Since its inception, the series has welcomed famous authors including Joyce Carol Oates, James McBride, Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Joseph O’Neill, Junot Diaz, Martin Espada, and Jhumpa Lahiri. We have been very fortunate to include such an esteemed group of authors in our series.

It is our intention—via both emerging and established writers—to heal the growing alienation of society that comes from technology, illiteracy and capitalist compartmentalization with the human stories that connect us to this world.

The program has elevated the reputation of the college as well as levels of literacy at BCC. The Literary Arts Series aims to continue making the community and college a place where people become better “readers” as has been our tradition over the last several years. Raising the level of literacy may seem like a humble accomplishment, but we consider it invaluable and believe it will help shape the next generation of readers.

2026 Speaker: Dure e Aziz Amna

Dure e Aziz Amna is our 2026 speaker, presented by the Literary Arts Series.

The event will be held on campus Tuesday, April 21, 2026, 2:00-4:00 p.m., with a book signing at 3:00 p.m. in A-104. All are welcome.

Thanks also to support from the Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation.

Raised in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Dur e Aziz Amna’s writing is inspired by her cross-cultural experiences in South Asia and the U.S. She is the author of the debut novel American Fever, named one of the Must-Read Books of 2022 by Harper’s Bazaar. Bestselling author Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of the New York Times bestseller A Place for Us, hailed Amna’s “brilliant new voice.” Her new novel, A Splintering, set in Pakistan, will be published in 2026.

Amna was selected as a Forbes 30 under 30 in 2022, and she was awarded the 2019 Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize, the London Magazine Short Story prize, the 2021 Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, and 2023 Award for Literature from the APALA (Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance). Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Dawn, the largest and oldest English language newspaper in Pakistan and the country’s newspaper of record. A graduate of Yale University, Dur e Aziz Amna received her MFA in creative writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She now lives in Newark, NJ.

Interviews

“Telling Stories That Feel True”: A Conversation with Dur e Aziz Amna

Essays

Your tongue is still yours: What happens when we lose the language of our ancestors?
Inheritance
Rutgers!
From Portugal to the Ironbound
From Pakistan to Scotland: The many homes of my mother
Writing Into and Out of My Long-Distance Grief

Reviews

She’s a horrible character — but you’ll root for her anyway
American Fever by Dur e Aziz Amna review – a subversive debut
Finding a Sense of Self and Place in “American Fever”
Hunger and Home: A review of Dur E Aziz Amna’s American Fever

Other Resources

BBC 2 Book Club for A Splintering
Interview