NIC gets LIT

North Idaho College will host award-winning author Lesley Nneka Arimah today.

Arimah will give a reading of her work and have a conversation with NIC Associate Professor of English Jonathan Frey about her work and her insights into contemporary fiction.

Arimah was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in the U.K., Nigeria and the U.S. She currently lives in Minnesota, where she is working on a novel.

Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Price and an O. Henry Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s and Granta and has received support for the Elizabeth George Foundation and MacDowell.

Her debut collection, “What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky,” won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club, among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 U.S. Artists Fellow in Writing.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Get Lit! Festival, an annual literary festival organized by Eastern Washington University.

The reading and conversation will be held at 7 p.m in Todd Lecture Hall in the Molstead Library on NIC’s main campus in Coeur d’Alene.

Arimah is a headline speaker in the 2022 Get Lit! lineup, leading the festival’s cumulating event – “An Evening with Brandon Hobson and Lesley Nneka Arimah” – at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane. She will also discuss short stories at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Montvale Event Center in Spokane.

Arimah is one of more than 75 writers to participate in the four-day festival, which includes writing workshops, readings, panel discussions and book fairs in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.

For more information about the Get Lit! Festival, visit www.getlitfestival.com.