Join us on Friday, March 7, 5-7pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for an evening read aloud and conversation by international and local writers: 2025 Cheuse Fellow: Klara Kalu; Prof. Vivek Narayanan: Author of "After"; Malik Thompson: Washington based writer; and Itoro Bassey: journalist and author. The evening is designed around the visit of Spring Cheuse Fellow: Danson Kahyana who will also be reading his creative work.

The evening will explore aspects of queerness and intimacy through literature and allyship. 

The boat (borrowed from songwriter Noah Kahan)  are the ideas that keep us afloat, conveying the beauty of the Republic of Imagination (borrowed from Azar Nafisi)! The images are from the cover of "After" by Vivek Narayanan. 

Featuring Danson Kahyana

The Cheuse Center is proud to announce Danson Kahyana as the Spring 2025 Cheuse Center Scholar. Kahyana, an esteemed writer and academic from Uganda, will visit the Washington area from March 2 to March 8, 2025.

This prestigious fellowship, supported by the Scholl Foundation, is dedicated to providing opportunities for writers at risk, offering them a space to create, reflect, and share their stories. Kahyana’s work—marked by its courage, depth, and humanity—has long amplified underrepresented narratives, making him an exceptional fit for this honor.

During his residency, Kahyana will engage with students, faculty, and the local literary community through public readings, and conversations about his work and the broader challenges faced by writers globally. 

We are thrilled to host Danson Kahyana and looks forward to the impactful contributions he will bring to the spring program. Stay tuned for updates on events and opportunities.

MORE ABOUT DANSON KAHYANA: Sylvester Danson Kahyana is a visiting professor in the English Department at Boston College. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and Research, Harvard Kennedy School, having survived a brutal attack on his life on April 26, 2022. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa (where he is an Associate Researcher in the English Department) and an MA and BA in Literature from Makerere University (where he was an Associate Professor in the Literature Department before he fled Uganda). Uganda’s contributing editor to Index on Censorship and a former board member of PEN International as well as a former President of Ugandan PEN, he has defended artistic freedom and human rights for over two decades. A published poet and anthologist, he has edited five books and published more than 30 scholarly papers. Some of the awards he has received include the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network Individual Award (2023), the Fulbright Research Fellowship Award (2021), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Award (2015).

ABOUT ITORO BASSEY: Itoro Bassey is the author of Faith (Malarkey Books, 2022) and a journalist at the BBC. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Slice, Catapult, and Hippocampus, among others. A new piece of hers 'How Eno Became Enobong' is forthcoming in Fence (March 2025). 
She is the recent winner of the W.S. Porter Prize for her short short story collection Ajebutter Woman that will published in 2027 through Regal House Publishing. This collection is poised to complicate notions surrounding identity and social dynamics while engaging readers with its rich storytelling. Some of the other awards she has received are from International Literary Seminars, Glimmer Train, and Prairie Schooner. She has received fellowships from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Edward Albee Foundation, and elsewhere. In 2018 she lived between Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia for five years which has broadened her perspective on diaspora and belonging. In her spare time, she supports writers in the Washington, DC area as a board member of The Inner Loop. 

ABOUT MALIK THOMPSON: Malik Thompson (he/they) is a Black queer person from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts. He can be found on IG via the handle @latesummerstar.

ABOUT VIVEK NARAYANAN: Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S. His new collection is After (NYRB Poets, 2022).  A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019. He teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.

ABOUT KLARA KALU: Klara Kalu is an MFA Creative Writing student specializing in Fiction at George Mason University. She writes contemporary stories that enlighten and offer insights into the intricacies of African narratives, focusing on themes of love, loss, and emotional depths of human connection. Her work explores the spaces between tradition and modernity, memory and reinvention, offering fresh perspectives on identity and belonging. With the Cheuse Fellowship, Klara is traveling to Barbados to explore the echoes of culture and kinship within the island’s communities. Through archival research, oral histories, and on-the-ground immersion, she aims to trace how ancestral ties have endured across generations despite displacement and erasure. Her project seeks to breathe life into forgotten stories, reconnecting threads between the Caribbean and Africa, and reimagining the ways in which history continues to shape contemporary diasporic experiences.

ABOUT NOTHING PERSONAL This exhibition closely examines the book, Nothing Personal (1964), a collaborative artwork in book form by two legendary American artists, James Baldwin, the African American writer, public intellectual, and civil rights activist, and Richard Avedon the Jewish fashion and portrait photographer. Learn more here:  https://www.masonexhibitions.org/exhibitions/nothing-personal-mea

Art work in this post is from the cover of "After", by Vivek Narayanan. This cover is from his Indian edition, published by Harper Collins.  

More information on the lineup to come! 

Join us on Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a film screening of ‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round’, followed by a brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Ilana Trachtman. The film is about the desegregation of Glen Echo Park, and it discusses the role that Howard University students played in leading this effort.

For almost 60 years, Glen Echo Amusement Park was the wholesome, beloved playground of white metropolitan Washington, DC. Every summer, tens of thousands enjoyed its Crystal Pool, wooden rollercoaster, Spanish Ballroom, and Tunnel of Love. But the Black children living nearby could only gawk from the road.

In June of 1960, three shocking, unprecedented events happened at “idyllic” Glen Echo Amusement Park:

• Howard University Students arrived up at the Park, and sat down on the carousel.

• White, middle-aged neighbors, largely Jewish, joined the protests.

• The American Nazi Party showed up.

AIN'T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND is the forgotten story of how those three events shook metropolitan Washington, forced sides, changed lives, and ignited sparks that flew out across the Civil Rights Movement for years to come.

Using just-discovered archival footage, and focusing on the stories of six individuals, viewers are transported to those heady days, when private businesses could choose their customers, and the walls between Black and white were so high that friendships were unimaginable.

AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND offers a rare intimate lens on one protest in the early Civil Rights Movement. Telling the story of one amusement park, one group of individuals, and one moment in time, the laser focus allows for deep understanding of the non-famous individuals whose efforts, sacrifices, and personal awakenings fueled the Civil Rights Movement.