Writing Now Reading Series

Structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers, the Writing Now Reading Series and Seminar is a required course for CalArts MFA creative writing graduate students that showcases vibrant new modalities for writing that refresh today’s interconnected creative fields. Writing Now offers inspiring points of contact and critical conversation about writing process and practice between visiting writers, students and local audiences, with an eye for fostering the collaborative, the future-forward, and the unexpected in literature.

This fall, the series features readings and workshops with writers whose work is connected to the Creative Writing Program’s concentrations: Image & Text, Documentary Strategies, Writing & Performativity, and Writing & Its Publics.

How to Attend the Writing Now Readings Series

Readings will take place in Butler Building BB#4-G. Any location changes will be announced to the RSVP list and on the event pages.

RSVP Here 

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Spring 2024

Blue Tomorrows - A Symposium with Corina Copp, Rebekah Weikel, & Missouri Williams

Blue Tomorrows - A Symposium with Corina Copp, Rebekah Weikel, & Missouri Williams

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CalArts Campus

Bijou Theater

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Blue Tomorrows brings together three artists whose work represents new ecologies at the intersections of writing and image-making. Through personal, political, and philosophical engagement attuned to the impermanent, the indeterminate, and the transcendent qualities of material practice, Corina Copp, Rebekah Weikel, and Missouri Williams each take distinct approaches to feminist world-making. The School of Critical Studies is honored to host a discussion of their work in poetry, criticism, cinema, and fiction.

A reception will follow the symposium in Room D206. Image & Text work from students in the Creative Writing department will be screened at the reception. All are welcome.

Corina Copp is a poet, critic, and artist. She is the North American translator of Chantal Akerman's My Mother Laughs (The Song Cave); the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse), and the play, The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love. Work has appeared in Frieze, BOMB, Cabinet, Film Comment, Metrograph Journal, and is anthologized in America: Films from Elsewhere, Out of Everywhere 2, Sallones de belleza, and Triple Canopy. She programs Rotations, a screening series focused on experimental nonfiction filmmaking by women and feminist practitioners, in residence at 2220 Arts + Archives. Copp is a PhD candidate in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. She has taught at The Poetry Project, Poets House, Wendy’s Subway, and Mount St. Mary’s; and is a current faculty member at CalArts School of Film/Video.

Rebekah Weikel is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. From 2006 to 2016 she oversaw Penny-Ante, a book press invested in revisionary and innovative forms. In 2021, she established Interlude Docs, an online archive where documents engaged with the theme of impermanence are acquired from writers and artists. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Missouri Williams is a writer and editor who lives in London. She is the co-editor of the film journal Another Gaze. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and Five Dials. The Doloriad is her first book.

Fall 2023

Writing Now Reading Series: Myriam Gurba

Writing Now Reading Series: Myriam Gurba

Myriam Gurba is the author of Creep: Accusations and Confessions, an essay collection described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “one of the best books of the decade.” Her memoir Mean was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Gurba’s writing has been published by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Believer, and many other publications. Along with Roberto Lovato and David Bowles, she is a co-founder of Dignidad Literaria, a grassroots organization that opposes white supremacy in the publishing industry. She lives in California and loves it. 

"Myriam Gurba is the most fearless writer in America. And is most generous and kind to those who have no champion, while setting fire to the towers of the villainous. Creep is another beautifully daring book. Long may she reign."

—Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Good Night, Irene

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Writing Now Reading Series: Henry Hoke

Writing Now Reading Series: Henry Hoke

Henry Hoke reading and reception. Hoke is the author of five books, most recently the novel Open Throat (MCD/FSG) and the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury). He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and edits humor at The Offing. He is also an alum of the MFA Creative Writing program at CalArts. "An indictment of human culture, narrated by a mountain lion Henry Hoke's novel follows an observant—and starving—cougar living in the Los Angeles hills surrounding the Hollywood sign ... Though many readers will label Open Throat unconventional, this act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception. At its best, fiction can make the familiar strange in order to bring readers and our world into scintillating focus. Open Throat is what fiction should be." Marie Helene Bertino, The New York Times

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Writing Now Reading Series: Ronaldo Wilson

Writing Now Reading Series: Ronaldo Wilson

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize, and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer, and performer.

With poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Duriel E. Harris, Wilson cofounded the performance-based Black Took Collective. Wilson is currently an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and splits his time between Santa Cruz and Long Island, New York.

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Writing Now Reading Series: Jos Charles

Writing Now Reading Series: Jos Charles

Jos Charles is author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is visiting faculty for UC RIverside’s Creative Writing Department and teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program. She resides in Long Beach, CA.

All readings take place on campus, followed by reception. Livestream available on CalArts' Creative Writing YouTube.

Event Details

For more information on the Writing Now Reading Series or for accessibility questions, please contact the Visiting Artist Coordinator at csartistcoordinator@calarts.edu