Living Writers Series Spring 2021
Please register here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApc-yoqD8oH9PfnFfv2hc2pmu6bTRm5ilH
4/8 Andrea Abi-Karam
Reading with Literature Graduate Student Madison McCartha
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. With Drea Marina they co-hosted Words of Resistance [2012-2017] a monthly, radical, QTPOC open floor poetry series to fundraise for political prisoners’ commissary funds. Selected by Bhanu Kapil, Andrea’s debut is EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in September 2021 at Nightboat Books. Andrea toured with Sister Spit in 2018 and has performed at RADAR, The Poetry Project, The STUD, Basilica Soundscape, TransVisionaries, Southern Exposure, Counterpulse, & Radius for Arab-American Writers. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.
Madison McCartha is a black poet and multimedia artist whose work appears in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, DREGINALD, The Fanzine, Full Stop, jubilat, and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from Winter Tangerine, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and was shortlisted for the 2019-2021 CAAPP Creative Writing Fellowship. In summer 2021, Madison will hold a residency through the Ucross Foundation.
Madison holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where they received the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Award in Creative Writing, and is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Madison's debut book-length poem, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in 2021. Their second book of poetry, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.
4/22 Anthony Cody
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and finalist for a 2020 National Book Award. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and co-edited How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. He is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from Fresno State where he continues to collaborate with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Anthony has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference. He provides communication support to CantoMundo, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press.
5/6 Toya Groves and Muriel Leung
Reading with Literature Graduate Student Mia Boykin
Toya L. Groves is a lifelong teacher and writer who currently works with formerly incarcerated students at Laney College in Oakland, California. She holds a BA in African American studies from UC. Berkeley, a MA in Women’s Spirituality from Sofia University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her writing includes attributes that reveal both the challenges of her journey while also highlighting the victory of forgiving herself and those who once trespassed against her. After losing the use of her right dominant hand in a car accident she re-learned to write and navigate the world, as a black person and as a woman, literally single handedly. It is her life’s work to illuminate the dark, by telling the story of Motherhood as she sees and experiences it with hopes to inspire others to raise up their voices in chants for healing, love, and freedom.
Mia Boykin is a daughter of California, originally born and raised in Los Angeles and currently finds home in The Bay. Known mainly by her stage/pen name, Mimi Tempestt, she is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She is the creator of the wonderful archival interview series Black.Queer.Alive. which highlights the personal narratives of Black and queer people throughout the world. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misrememberings, is forthcoming with Co-Conspirator Press. She was chosen for Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices for poetry in 2021, and is currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco.
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021, and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others.
She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau.
5/20 Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). The author of eight collections of poetry and prose, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Harvard, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s currently a Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College. Her second book, Hyperboreal (winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize), will be published in translation by Editions Caractères this summer, and a collection of new poems, Dark Traffic, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in September. She raises her sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
5/27 Senior Projects Student Reading
