Laura Marris and Nishant Batsha

Chautauqua Writers' Center Faculty Reading -- Featuring Laura Marris (Poetry) and Nishant Batsha (Prose) Laura Marris is an essayist, poet, and translator. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Believer, Harper's, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The Yale Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her translations include Albert Camus's The Plague, Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan (co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop), and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. Her work has been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Her first book, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf 2024. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo. Nishant Batsha is the author of the novels A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2025) and Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022). He holds a doctorate in history from Columbia University, where he was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. Originally from Northern California, he now lives in Buffalo, NY with his family.