Living Writers Series Fall 2023
Humanities 1 Lecture Hall
This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
10/12 - Thaïs Miller
Thaïs Miller is the author of the novel Our Machinery (2008) and the short story collection The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009). She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature, pursuing a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MA in Creative Writing for Social Activism from New York University in 2011 and her BA magna cum laude with Honors in Literature and a minor in Music Performance from American University in 2009. Her short stories, dramatic writing, poetry, essays on craft, book reviews, and interviews have been published by CRAFT, Nautilus, The Los Angeles Review of Books's PubLab, Entropy, The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Carolina Academic Press, and appear in many other literary journals and magazines. For more information, visit: https://thaismiller.
10/19 - J. Vanessa Lyon
J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of Lush Lives (an inaugural title of Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), the Audible Original The Groves, and Meet Me in Madrid, written under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. A James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell and Bread Loaf Contributor in Nonfiction, she received a Ph.D. in the history of art from UC Berkeley and teaches visual culture--with a focus on race, queerness, and gender--at Bennington College in Vermont.
10/26 - Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (‘23). Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of ″ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Yale Review, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English.
Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
11/16 - Chia Chia Lin -- This event is in Merrill 102.
Chia-Chia Lin is the author of The Unpassing (FSG 2019), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's’ Choice and won the 2020 Clark Fiction Prize. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, NewYorker.com, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, and more. She currently lives in Northern California.
11/30 - Justin Torres
Justin Torres is the author of the novel Blackouts. His debut novel, We the Animals, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA.
Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers' books are available for purchase).
