Intimate Thresholds: Identity and Longing

Participants

• Nicole Krauss Author

  Nicole Krauss has been called “one of American’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” by the New York Times, “a contemporary master,” by Esquire, and “one of American’s greatest writers” by the Financial Times. She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, Forest Dark, Great House and The History of Love and the short story collection To Be a Man. She was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute at Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Her new novel, Vita, will be published in September 2027.

• Julia Franck Author

  Julia Franck is the author of nine books, novels and nonfiction, among them her German Book Prize winning novel Blindness of the Heart (2008, translated by Anthea Bell), a memoir, Worlds Apart (2026, translated by Imogen Taylor) and, most recently, a biography about Rilke’s last lover, Baladine Klossowska, I am Drowning in the Waters of my Love. She writes literary essays on art and dance, and biographical and critical texts about literature.

• Tess Lewis Moderator

  Tess Lewis’s translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Lutz Seiler, and Anne Weber. Her essays and reviews have appeared in journals and newspapers including The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Miami Herald, Bookforum, World Literature Today, and The Hudson Review. Tess Lewis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. She was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a 2023-24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. In 2023, She received the Friedrich Ulfers Prize, which recognizes those who champion the advancement of German-language literature in the U.S.