Two writers selected as Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts’ Fellows will read on Wednesday, September 24 at 4:30 p.m. in the Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center. Hodder Fellow and poet Roger Reeves and Princeton Arts Fellow and fiction writer Hanna Pylväinen will begin their residencies at the Lewis Center by opening the Program in Creative Writing’s 2014-15 Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, which is free and open to the public.

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel, We Sinners (Henry Holt 2012), which The Los Angeles Times called, “Remarkably funny for a book about a deeply religious family grappling with loss of faith,” tells the story — in alternating chapters from the point of view of the parents and several of the nine children — of the Midwestern Rovaniemi family, members of a Finnish sect of Lutheranism called Laestadianism. Ms. Pylväinen is the recipient of residencies at Djerassi, The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. In 2012 she received the Whiting Writers’ Award and in 2013 the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune. Originally from suburban Detroit, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow. She currently lives in Brooklyn where she is completing her second novel, The End of Drum Time.

Roger Reeves’s first book, King Me, recently published by Copper Canyon Press, was described by The Los Angeles Review of Books as “A book of varied tongues and urgencies. Van Gogh is here, Mike Tyson, Ernest ‘Tiny’ Davis, and in the first and last poems, someone named Roger Reeves appears. It’s a book of inhabitations and transformations; the disembodied multitudes that constitute a single body.”

Mr. Reeves’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. His poem, “Kletic of Walt Whitman,” was selected for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2013 Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

In addition to Mr. Reeves, Hodder Fellows for 2014-15 include choreographer Nora Chipaumire, visual artist Miko Veldkamp, and playwright/screenwriter Gabriel Jason Dean. Ms. Pylväinen begins her two-year appointment as an Arts Fellow along with theater/performance artist Aaron Landsman. They join graphic design artist Danielle Aubert and musician/composer Jason Treuting who are beginning their second year as Arts Fellows.

———