A Celebration of Edmund White: Thomas Beller, Michael Cunningham, Yiyun Li, Tracy K. Smith, Michael Carroll and David McConnell

Thomas Beller is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. He is the author of six books, including the novel The Sleep-Over Artist (a New York Times Notable Book), the essay collection Degas at the Gas Station, and J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (winner of the New York City Book Award for Biography/Memoir). From 1990 to 2010 he edited Open City Magazine and Books, and since 2000 he has published mrbellersneighborhood.com, a literary site of nonfiction sketches and essays about New York that was nominated for a Webby Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and Robert B. Silver’s Works-in-Progress Award, he is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including The Hours, which received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was adapted into a film in 2002. A work of non-fiction, Unsayable, was published in July, 2026. Cunningham is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University.

Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction — Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl — and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, translator and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.

Michael Carroll is the author of two collections of short stories, Little Reef and Other Stories (winner of the 2015 Sue Kaufman prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters) and Stella Maris and Other Key West Stories. He is co-adaptor along with Brian Alessandro of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story: the Graphic Novel, illustrated by Igor Karash. He lived with Edmund White for thirty years, and the pair were married twelve years at the time of White’s death.