Vanity Fairwill host a memorial for the late Christopher Hitchens this Friday in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. Scheduled to pay tribute in New York are Stephen Fry, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Christopher Buckley, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and physicist Lawrence Krauss. “In assembling a roster of speakers with deep belief in the power of the written word and the wisdom of nature and the universe, we hope to do an atom of justice to Christopher’s memory,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said. A limited number of seats are available to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Those interested in attending should send a request to hitchens@vf.com.

Just a few months after his death on December 15, 2011, in Houston, Texas, the American Society of Magazine Editors nominated Hitchens as a finalist in the best-columns-and-commentary category for its 2012 National Magazine Awards. Hitchens’s three essays—“When the King Saved God,” “Unspoken Truths,” and “From Abbattabad to Worse”—touched on the topics of politics, religion, and dealing with the diminishing effects of chemotherapy.