Living Writers Series Winter 2025

Thursdays, 5:20 to 6:55 PM  Humanities 1 Lecture Hall 206. This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary. 

Schedule

January 16: Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen is the author of eight poetry collections; her latest is The Sorrow Apartments (2024). You can also find her writing in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Review of Books, etc. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Merrimack College; starting this spring, she will teach at Boston University. She also directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series. Her hometown is Atlanta, Georgia.

January 23: Venita Blackburn

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world and was selected as one of the NYTimes and NPR’s best books of 2024. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

February 27: Hannah Sanghee Park

Hannah Sanghee Park is the author of two poetry collections. a chapbook, Ode Days Ode (2011) and The Same-Different (2015), which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2013, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her hometown is Federal Way, Washington, and she currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

March 6: Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, including Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019) and The Opening Question (2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize. In 2010, she received the Howard Foundation Award. Over the years, she has taught at the New School, Goddard College, and the University of Montana-Missoula. She currently teaches at Pomona College and is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Art. Her hometown is Framingham, Massachusetts.  

March 13: Student Reading