Writing Now Reading Series

The Writing Now Reading Series and Seminar is a required year-long graduate course for all first-year graduate students in the MFA Creative Writing Program. It is structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers. The Visiting Writer element of Writing Now continues as a one-credit course in the spring, which is required for both first-year and second-year students. It consists of four visiting writers, one in relation to each of the four concentrations offered by the program (Documentary Strategies, Image and Text, Writing and Its Publics, and Writing and Performance). These events will be curated and hosted by faculty teams representing each of the concentrations.

Upcoming

2018-2019

Forrest Gander

Writing Now Reading Series
Forrest Gander's books of poetry include Eye Against Eye, Torn Away, and Science and Steepleflower. Though primarily a poet, Gander is also a translator, novelist, essays and the editor of several anthologies.  He has won the Whiting Writers' Award, a Howard Foundation Award, the Jessica Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovative North American writing. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Artists. He has taught at Harvard and Brown. His most recent book Be With is a longlist finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

 

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Ming Holden

Writing Now Reading Series

Ming Lauren Holden is an activist, actor, educator and writer who was raised on a zebra ranch on California’s central coast. Ming has worked in the international development sector on four continents in thirteen countries since 2001. She founded the Survival Girls, a self-sustaining theater group for Congolese refugee women in a Nairobi slum, a project that received support from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ming studied Literary Arts at Brown University; earned her MFA at Indiana University; and is currently pursuing a PhD in Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches undergraduates and incarcerated youth and researches how theater can help with rehabilitation and trauma recovery. Lidia Yuknavitch selected Ming's memoir as the winner of the inaugural Kore Press Memoir Award. Kore published Ming's book Refuge in 2018.

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Jackie Wang

Writing Now Reading Series
JACKIE WANG is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance.

 

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Rebecca Brown

Writing Now Reading Series
Rebecca Brown is the author of ten books of prose, including The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, Excerpt From A Family Medical Dictionary, The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, The Haunted House, The Children’s Crusade, and What Keeps Me Here. Her most recent book is Not Heaven, Somewhere Else, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Her work has received the Boston Book Review Award for fiction, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and a Washington State Governor’s Award. In 2005, she was appointed Creative Director of Literary Programs at Centrum, an arts center in Port Townsend, Washington. She is a faculty member in the Plainfield, Vermont residency option of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.

 

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Marc Fischer, Writing + Its Publics

Marc Fischer is a member of the group Temporary Services (temporaryservices.org) which maintains the publishing imprint and webstore Half Letter Press (halfletterpress.com). Since 1998, Temporary Services has made 118 booklets, books, and newspapers along with posters, flyers and other forms of printed ephemera. They have produced works on a wide range of social, political and creative subjects with dozens of collaborators. In 2007 Fischer established the project Public Collectors which focuses on the kind of cultural and subcultural materials that are normally the domain of amateur experts working outside of museums and large institutions. Public Collectors has created over 35 publications to date, including Hardcore Architecture (https://hardcorearchitecture.tumblr.com), exploring the relationship between the architecture of living spaces and the history of underground American hardcore bands in the 1980s, and the Library Excavations booklet series.  

 

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Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence: Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours(Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetryfrom the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011); and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

 

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Anne Burdick, Image + Text

Anne Burdick is the Chair of Media Design Practices (MDP), a graduate program at Art Center College of Design focused on designing for the future of information and communication technologies. To address the global and social dimensions of this work, the MDP recently established two tracks. In the Field track, students work on social issues in a real-world context—the first cohort just returned from working at UNICEF’s Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda. In the Lab track, students work with emerging ideas from technology and science—they recently worked with a neuroscientist from the Biophotonics Lab at CalTech on a project inspired by new sensing technology from Intel Research.

 

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Rosamond S. King, Writing + Performativity

Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer and artist. Poetry publications include the Lambda Award-winning collection Rock | Salt | Stone and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, such as The Feminist Wire, Drunken Boat, Harriet, The Caribbean Writer and the award-winning Kindergarde: Experimental Writing for Children. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination won the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best Caribbean Studies Book. Her scholarship has also appeared in several journals, including Callaloo, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Women and Performance and Thought & Action,the journal of the NEA. 

 

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2017-2018

Mady Schutzman

Writing Now Reading Series
Mady is a writer, teacher, and theatre artist with an MA in sociocultural anthropology and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies. She is a free lance practitioner and renowned scholar of the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and co-editor of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (Routledge, 1994) and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (Routledge, 2006). Schutzman's current research focuses on forms of resistance that rely upon the ambiguous and paradoxical strategies of comedy and trickery. Her 2013 film Dear Comrade documents the story of Llano del Rio (1914-18), the most important non-religious communitarian experiment in western American history.

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Bruce Bauman

Writing Now Reading Series
Bruce Bauman is the author of the novels Broken Sleep and And The Word Was. He was the Senior Editor of Black Clock literary magazine from its inception in 2004 until its closing in 2016. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, Bookforum, BOMB, Slice, LitHub and numerous literary magazines and anthologies.

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Kevin Young (Postponed)

Writing Now Reading Series

Kevin Young, 2018 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence, has had to postpone his visit. Date TBD.

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Harmony Holiday

Writing Now Reading Series
Harmony Holiday is the author of Negro League Baseball (2011), winner of the Fence Books Motherwell Prize; Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2013), a “dos-a-dos” book featuring poetry, letters, and essays; and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017).

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Rikki Ducornet

Writing Now Reading Series

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