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.

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Spring 2024

Writing Now Reading Series: Percival Everett

Writing Now Reading Series: Percival Everett

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CalArts Campus

BB4G

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Image courtesy of the author.

The New Yorker recently wrote of Percival Everett that he “has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature. The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits.” Since that article was published Everett has published another novel, Dr. No, which like so many of Everett’s novel could likely only have been conceived in a universe where Percival Everett writes novels. Its protagonist is a brilliant and neurodiverse professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing: he is an expert whose area of study is nothing. This makes him a compelling partner for the aspiring Supervillain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal not gold bars but a shoebox containing Nothing. Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain turns out of have originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.” Dr. No follows closely on Booker Prize finalist The Trees, which revisits the story of Emmett Till and the history of lynching in America in a work that NPR described as “a novel of compelling contrasts: frank, pitiless prose leavened by dark humor; a setting that is simultaneously familiar and strange; a genre-defying, masterful blend of the sacred and the profane.” Everett’s many other works are equally original, unsettling and often hilarious: like his novel I am Not Sidney Poitier, about a protagonist named “Not Sidney Poitier.”  He is a Professor at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

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