Living Writers Series Winter 2024

Thursdays, 5:20 to 6:50 PM

Humanities 1 Lecture Hall or, to attend remotely, http://bit.ly/loving_writers

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required. 

January 18

PHD Grad Alum

Connor Bassett. C Dylan Bassett's first novel, Gad's Book, was published in 2023. His writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Jared Joseph. Jared Joseph’s most recent writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and Action. His A Book About Myself Called Hell was published by Kernpunkt Press in 2022, and his novel Danny the Ambulance was published by Outpost 19 in 2023. Jared Joseph teaches at Los Angeles City College and lives in Los Angeles, where he writes, plays music, and drinks coffee like it's a hot dog eating contest. 

Eric Sneathen. Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Alameda. He is the author of Don't Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023), Minor Work (MO0ON/IO, 2021), and Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016). With Lauren Levin, he co-edited the selected fiction of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021). His essays and interviews have been published by Jacket2, SF MoMA's Open Space, Poetry Foundation, and Social Text Online.

Jose Antonio Villarán. Jose Antonio Villarán (Perú-México-United States) is the author of two books of poetry, la distancia es siempre la misma (2006), el cerrajero (2012); one book of cross-genre literature, open pit (2022); one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta (2018); and the AMLT project (http://amlt-elcomienzo.blogspot.pe), an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship. A Spanish edition of open pit was published in June 2023 by Álbum del Universo Bakterial in Peru, and Villarán's fourth book, a work of Auto-Fiction, titled Dear Excelsior, Kiko died in Vietnam while he was playing fútbol, is forthcoming from the same press in 2025.

Emma Wood. Originally from New York City, Emma Winsor Wood has degrees from Harvard, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Real World (BlazeVOX books, 2022) and translator of A Failed Performance (Plays Inverse, 2018). Recent work has appeared in The Drift, The American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, jubilat, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Xavier University in Cincinnati and is executive director of Stone Soup, the literary magazine for kids, by kids.

January 25

Undergrad Alum

Sina Grace. Sina Grace is a GLAAD media award-winning writer and artist living in Los Angeles, best known for a prolific library of work that balances slice-of-life, blockbuster action, and everything in between. His groundbreaking Iceman series at Marvel Comics paved the way for Grace to work on all of his favorites: Jughead's Time Police for Archie, Wonder Woman for DC, Go Go Power Rangers for Boom Studios, and The Haunted Mansion for Disney/ IDW. He is currently promoting Rockstar and Softboy at Image Comics, and Superman: The Harvests of Youth, a young adult graphic novel he wrote and illustrated at DC.

February 1 

Undergrad Debut Novelists

Chiara Barzini. Chiara Barzini is an Italian author and screenwriter, nominated among the 100 most influential Women of 2020 by Forbes Italy. She is the author of the story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and the novel Things That Happened Before The Earthquake (Doubleday, 2017.) Her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Bomb, Noon, Freeman’s, LitHub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, NY Tyrant, ZYZZYVA, and the anthology Tiny Crimes edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli NietoShe has a regular column in D Repubblica and has written articles and profiles in Rolling Stone, Vogue, T Magazine, Interview, Harper’s, Vanity Fair Italy, Vice, and Dazed&Confused, amongst others. She has recently translated Goliarda Sapienza’s poems into English and is at work on a translation of Diane Williams’ latest story collection into Italian.

Rebecca Rukeyser. Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022; Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Believer, Granta, The Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Davis, California, Rebecca has lived and worked in South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and China. She currently lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

February 22

Undergrad Poets

Sarah Ghazal Ali. Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. 

Julian Talamantez Brolaski. Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country musician, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011).  Julian is a 2023-2024 Bagley-Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry.  Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020).  With band Juan & the Pines, Julian released the EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album, It’s Okay Honey came out in August 2023.

March 7

Former Professors

Peter Gizzi. Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Now It’s Dark (2020), and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), all from Wesleyan. In 2020 Carcanet brought out Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan brought out In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and, with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He teaches poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nathaniel Mackey. Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic, and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006 and a Guggenheim Award in 2010; in 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and in 2015 he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. In 2016, he was awarded a Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award. Mackey earned his BA from Princeton University and his PhD from Stanford University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Birds Anonymous (2023), Breath and Precarity (2021), Blue Fasa (2015), Nod House (2011), the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem (2006), Whatsaid Serif (1998), and Eroding Witness (1985), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series. He has published five book-length installments of his ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, beginning with Bedouin Hornbook in 1986. David Hajdu described the prose project as “not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz." The first three volumes of Mackey’s series were published together by New Directions in 2010. A recording of Mackey’s work Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25 was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company, with musical accompaniment by Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh.