Thursdays, 6:00 - 7:45 PM
Humanities Lecture Hall
Free and open to the public
Into Archives—Across Genres is a reading/performance series featuring poets, critics, memoirists, activists, visual artists, essayists, short story writers, and novelists who mine various archives to investigate race, gender, sexuality, and class. Writing across multiple disciplines – whether via the epistle, film & photo essay, poem, story, collage or hybrid text – these authors mine history and present day experience, exploring and complicating the possibilities and features of genre in their art.
October 11
Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007); co-editor/founder of The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of the anthology, War Diaries, a collection of writings on Black gay male desire and survival in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She recently participated in a conference, “Emergent Communities,” hosted by the Poetics & Politics research cluster at UCSC, a reading tour with The Dark Room Collective, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of their founding of a nationally-renown, self-funded African diasporic reading series and arts exhibition, and has just completed research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, NY, for her novel, The Curator. Ms. Bryant is faculty in the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.
October 18
Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy
Kevin Killian has written two novels, Shy (1989) andArctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1990), and three books of stories, Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001), and Impossible Princess (2009). He is the author of two coillections of poetry, Argento Series (2001), and Action Kylie (2008). For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written forty plays, most recently Box of Rain (2012). Recent projects include Screen Tests, an edition of Killian's film writing, a show inspired by the late poet Elizabeth Bishop (in collaboration with artist Ajit Chauhan) at Oakland’s Sight School last fall, and a book of Killian’s intimate photographs, Tagged, to appear in the spring. His new novel, 22 years in the making, is called Spreadeagle from Publication Studio.
Dodie Bellamy’s most recent book is the buddhist. Time Out New York named her chapbook Barf Manifesto “Best Book Under 30 Pages” for 2009. Other books include Academonia, Pink Steam,Cunt-Ups and The Letters of Mina Harker. She has been awarded a Firecracker Alternative Book Award and a Bay Guardian Goldie Award. She is a columnist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space blog.
October 25
Cathy Park Hong
Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, was published in May 2012 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.
November 1
Peter Orner
Peter Orner is the author of four books of fiction including, Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor's Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. His first book, Esther Stories, will be re-issued next year with a forward by Marilynne Robinson. His latest collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge will also be published next year. Recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orner is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
November 8
Truong Tran
Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. He is the author of five collections of poetry, and a children's book. His work has been translated into Dutch, French, Spanish and Vietnamese. Truong recently presented both his visual and written work at the Smithsonian Gallery in Washington DC. In 2011, he was featured writer at The Poetry Festival International, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
November 29
M. NourbeSe Philip
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practised law in the City of Toronto for seven years before leaving to write full-time. She has published poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. Among her best known published works are She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet's Daughter, a young adult novel. Her most recent work,Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with ideas of the law, history and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade.
December 6
Student Reading
The Living Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Siegfried B. & Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Fund, Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, Literature Department/Creative Writing Program, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, East Asian Studies Program, Bay Tree Bookstore, Latino and Latin American Studies Center, Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, El Centro, Cantu Queer Center, Chicano Latino Research Center, Stevenson College, Oakes College, and Merrill College.
Books are sold at the readings by The Bay Tree Bookstore.
Co-Sponsorship
Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund
Poets & Writers through the grant from the James Irvine Foundation
Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center
Literature Department and the Creative Writing Program
UC Presidential Chair Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies
Music Department
Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment
The Ethnic Resource Centers and the African American Resource & Cultural Center
Institute for Humanities Research
