School of Critical Studies

Aisha was born and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in English from Carleton College, an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She is the author of The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.

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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.

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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 novels could likely only have been conceived in a universe where Percival Everett writes novels. Dr. No follows closely on Booker Prize finalist The Trees, which revisits the story of Emmett Till and the history of lynching in America. Everett is a professor at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.  

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Lidia Yuknavitch is the bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, and The Small Backs of Children, the short story collection Verge, the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water, and The Misfit's Manifesto, based on her TED Talk "On the Beauty of Being a Misfit," now with well over four million views. She founded Corporeal Writing in Portland, OR. She now lives in the woods next to the ocean.

This is a virtual event that will be screened in Generator 201/202 with a reception to follow. Reading(s) will be streamed via the Creative Writing Program's YouTube Channel.

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Ariana Reines is a poet and Obie-winning playwright from Salem Massachusetts. Her most recent book, A Sand Book, won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is currently Mary Routt Endowed Chair in Writing at Scripps College & founding director of Invisible College, an evolving experiment in the study of poetry & sacred texts.

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Aida Salazar is an award-winning author, arts activist, and translator whose writings explore issues of identity and social justice. She is the author of middle grade verse novels The Moon Sithin and Land of the Cranes and the picture book, In the Spirit of a Dream. Her forthcoming books include the historical fiction novel, A Seed in the Sun; the bio picture book, Jovita Wore Pants: The Story of a Mexican Freedom Fighter; and the anthology Calling the Moon.

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A graduate of CalArts MFA writing program, Carribean Fragoza’s first book is the story collection, Eat the Mouth that Feeds You, and her arts/culture reviews and essays have been published in online national and international magazines such as Aperture, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, KCET, Culture Strike, and Tropics of Meta. She is also the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multi-disciplinary arts collective.

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Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down.

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Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic/writer, poet, and educator. Her/their new book Brown Neown (Coffee House Press, 2022) is an ekphrastic memoir that considers what it means to be a Latinx artist during the Trump era.

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