Living Writers Series Winter 2021
Please register here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0odu-rqTItE9QqDMpeOhmcwkaMT5DxctOD?_x_zm_rtaid=w9s8Wd2ERkqlXJbYKXmtSw.1607033181685.f750a97044e063b2520202a537a7e5dd&_x_zm_rhtaid=292
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize.
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020). More of her writing can be found online at http://kmingchang.com
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University in Virginia.
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.
Lauren Groff is the author of five books, most recently Fates and Furies, a novel, and Florida, a short story collection. She has twice been shortlisted for the National Book Award, has won the Story Prize and France's Grand Prix de L'héroïne, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her next novel, Matrix, is slated for publication by Riverhead in September 2021.
Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The Forage House, called “stunning” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Work & Days was named one of The New York Times best books of poetry of 2016. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, hailed as “brilliant” in the LA Times.
