The Prairie Schooner relaunch: 100 years of literary publishing
Date
Location
Sponsors
Admission
RSVP required
Program is FREE to attend
About the Event
Join Coffee House at Salmagundi Club, as the legendary publication The Prairie Schooner celebrates a 100 years with Editor-in-Chief Timothy Schaffert and an incredible lineup of authors.
Timothy Schaffert, the new Glenna Luschei Editor in Chief of Prairie Schooner, relaunches the esteemed literary journal in its 100th year of publishing. He will discuss research, writing, place, and portraiture (of women, particularly) with a panel of recent Prairie Schooner contributors.
The Speakers
Cynthia Carr is the author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, and Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award; her essay in the Fall 2025 “Desire” issue of Prairie Schooner explores Peter Hujar’s famed photograph, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed.”
Priyam Goel has written for Vogue India and Humans of Cinema; she wrote a poem for Share a Book India Association for girls to recite on International Women’s Day, and she is currently at work on a story collection on women and their identities in a patriarchal society; she contributed the story “3 White Witches,” about an ashram of widows, to the Winter 2025 issue.
Ell Peck made history as the first transgender actress to be granted permission by the Tennessee Williams estate to play Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in the United States; her essay about the Off-Broadway production, “A Paper Lantern Over the Light: Becoming Blanche DuBois,” appears in the Fall 2025 issue.
Leslie Zemeckis is a best-selling author and award-winning actress and documentarian, whose work includes Behind the Burly Q, about the history of burlesque. Her essay in the Fall 2025 issue, “‘Everywhere They Talk Only of You’: The Celebrity Courtesans and the Writers Who Defiled Them,” draws from her research for her film Grandes Horizontales about French courtesans of the Second Empire.
Timothy Schaffert is the author most recently of a trilogy of novels on war and entertainment, including The Perfume Thief and the national bestseller The Titanic Survivors Book Club; he is the editor of Prairie Schooner and co-editor of Zero Street Fiction, an LGBTQ+ book series of the University of Nebraska Press. Schaffert will also recognize esteemed author Kurt Andersen for his Edward Stanley Award Essay on the Humanities, “Solitude ≠ Loneliness,” on Edward Hopper’s painting “Room in New York,” in the Spring 2026 issue.
Hungry?
Ticketed attendees are welcome to stay for dinner by indicating so in their Eventbrite RSVP.
There will be an à la carte menu to choose from. On the day of the event, you can pay for your meal with a card or your membership account (no cash).