In Person at JTS • All events begin at 7:00 p.m.

JTS’s MFA in Creative Writing invites you to its second storytelling festival, featuring Etgar Keret (MFA Director), Ira Glass, Françoise Mouly, and David Remnick. 

This year, the festival will revolve around the rich (and sometimes fraught) relationship between art and friendship. In a world as full of strife and discord as our own, one really needs a friend. The upcoming edition of SPOILER will bring together celebrated storytellers who collaborate. Four Jews—an author, a radio host, a designer, and a journalist—will dive into the highs and lows of their collaborations and talk about the ways in which their bonds with one another have informed their narratives.

Tuesday, September 8 • 7:00 p.m.

Etgar Keret and Ira Glass have been close friends and collaborators for over twenty years. On stage at JTS, they’ll fight, make up, and in-between discuss the stories that have shaped their friendship. 

Etgar Keret is one of the foremost writers of contemporary Israeli literature. His books have been published in some fifty languages and won numerous awards. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed virtuoso of the short story, Keret explores a variety of storytelling techniques, including plays, screenplays, songs, animated and live-action films, comic books and choreography. Keret is an Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the director of JTS’s MFA. 

Ira Glass is the host and creator of the public radio show This American Life. The program is heard each week—as a podcast and on public radio—by over three million people. It’s been on the air since 1995 and has won numerous awards for its inventive storytelling and journalistic excellence, including the very first Pulitzer Prize ever given to a radio show. 

Wednesday, September 9 • 7:00 p.m. 

Every week for the past twenty-eight years, The New Yorker’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, has sat down with editor David Remnick to pick the magazine’s iconic cover. At SPOILER, they’ll give the audience a rare peek behind the scenes of that zeitgeist-defining process. 

David Remnick was named the editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1992, after ten years with the Washington Post, where he was a Moscow correspondent. He is the author of seven books, including King of the World, Resurrection, and Lenin’s Tomb, for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Remnick’s most recent book, Holding the Note, is a collection of his profiles of musicians.

Françoise Mouly has been the art editor of The New Yorker since 1993, overseeing more than fifteen hundred covers. In 1978, she co-founded RAW Books & Graphics with Art Spiegelman, publishing and co-editing the groundbreaking comics magazine RAW, and in 2008 she founded TOON Books, a children’s comics imprint for young readers. Her honors include France’s Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (2011) and induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame (2021). 

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Tickets

Single Event: $45
Bundle for Both Nights: $72

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The MFA in Creative Writing is generously funded through the support of Abby Joseph Cohen.

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