Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts
September 9, 2025: Two Truths and a Lie
Think you can tell truth from fiction? Or do you think you can pull a fast one on your friends, classmates, and strangers? Put your name in the hat and take the stage – or just come and judge – Two Truths and a Lie at Kelly Writers House! Each round comes with a surprise theme, and the audience gets in on the action too! Whether you’re playing or guessing, come ready for laughs, surprises, and a little friendly deception. Don't forget to stay for the reception to enjoy some particularly delicious treats.
September 16, 2025: Should History and English Get Along?
History and English are deeply intertwined. Historians produce a form of Literature, and so many novelists choose to set their stories in the past. Conversely, historians can also use literature in their quest to understand the past. And yet the disciplines remain fundamentally distinct. This discussion will examine the intersections of History and English with an eye for common ground and disagreement. Ultimately, we’ll explore the question of how History and English can better equip each other as distinct forms of the Writing Arts.
September 17, 2025: A Conversation with Journalist John Harwood
John Harwood is the respected former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He also worked the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. He currently writes an online column, The Stakes, which appears on Zeteo.com, a media company that sponsors what it calls "good ol’ fashioned adversarial journalism."
September 25, 2025: Output: a celebration of computer-generated text
Conversations about computer-generated text often omit the long history of work in this area, tending to focus instead on the more recent launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 aims to correct this omission by gathering, celebrating, and contextualizing over seven decades of English-language pieces produced by generation systems and software. Join us for presentations of computer-generated texts and other experimental outputs by anthology editors Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Monfort, along with anthology contributors Jim Carpenter, Steve McLaughlin, and Syd Zolf.
October 22, 2025: A Conversation with David Corn
David Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC. He is the author or co-author of four New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump; Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP To Set Up the 2012 Election; and Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. He is also the author of the Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades and the novel Deep Background.
November 5, 2025: On Franz Kafka's Selected Stories
Join us for a conversation with Mark Harman, an award-winning translator and scholar, whose translation of Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024) presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. In Selected Stories, Harman offers a sensitive English rendering of Kafka’s unique German prose — terse, witty, and laden with ambiguities and double meanings. Professors Jean-Michel Rabate and Lillian Weissberg will co-lead the conversation.
November 6, 2025: Fact-Checking in Crisis: A Lunchtime Conversation
Join us for a conversation among three authors working across the fields of lexicography, fact-checking, journalism, and fiction writing. We'll talk about the history of fact-checking, its seemingly precipitous collapse in an age of misinformation, media defunding, and digital upheaval, and the status of truth in our current landscape. Kory Stamper, Stefan Fatsis, and Austin Kelley will be joined by Julia Bloch and students of the Creative Writing Program's Truth and Disinformation Lab.
March 25, 2026: A conversation with Molly Jong-Fast
Molly Jong-Fast is a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Opinion, a MSNBC political analyst, host of the FastPolitics podcast and author of The New York Times best seller How to Lose Your Mother.