The Poetry Center welcomes Michael David Lukas and Maia Ipp, friends and fellow essayists and novelists, for a Prose at The Poetry Center evening. Lukas and Ipp will each read from their work then join in conversation with one another and their audience.

Maia Ipp is a writer of fiction and cultural criticism. Since 2014, she's visited and occasionally lived in Central and Eastern Europe, including a year in Krakow on a writing fellowship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and several long stints in Berlin. She was one of the editors who relaunched the historic leftist magazine Jewish Currents in 2018, where she is now a contributing editor. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she held a De Alba fiction fellowship. She taught creative writing at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco and spent six years at City Lights Books as a bookseller, editor, and occasional personal assistant to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She is working on her first novel, SUGAR TRUCK. More here. 

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the Sami Rohr Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix Interallié for Foreign Fiction, and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He lives in Oakland and teaches at San Francisco State University. Photo by Irene Young.