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Living Writers Series Winter 2020

January 30
 
Jess Arndt's debut story collection, Large Animals, (Catapult Press, 2017), was short listed for the California Book Prize and long listed for The Story Prize, and is currently under re-print with the U.K.'s Cipher Press. Their writing has recently appeared in The LA Review of Books, THEM, Lithub, Hazzlitt, Fence, BOMB, Night Papers, and in collaborations with Swedish band, The Knife. Arndt received an MFA at Bard College and is the recipient of a Graywolf SLS Fellowship, a Fiction Fellowship at the New York Foundation of the Arts, and an Arctic Circle Residency (Fiction). She/they are a co-founder of the prose experiment, New Herring Press, and live in Los Angeles/WA State.

 
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February 6
 
Juan Martinez is a fiction writer. He was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs.
 
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February 13
 
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand and San José, California. She is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018) and the family history project Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming in early 2021. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, and Kenyon Review Online, among others, and has been translated into Burmese and Lithuanian. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, residencies at Hedgebrook and Millay Colony, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a B.A. in literary arts from Brown University and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver, the associate editor of the Denver Quarterly, and an instructor at Lighthouse Writer's Workshop.
 
https://www.thiriimyokyawmyint.com/
 
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February 20
 
Poet and fiction writer Jennifer Tseng was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first generation Chinese engineer and a third generation German American microbiologist. Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde (Rose Metal Press 2017), was a Firecracker Award finalist and winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award; and her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015), was shortlisted for the PEN American Center's Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award; it's available in English, Italian, and Danish. She's also the author of three award-winning books of poetry, The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005); the bilingual Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press 2013) featuring Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen; and Not so dear Jenny (Bateau Press 2017), poems made with her Chinese father’s English letters. 
 
 
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February 27
 
Gretchen Primack is a poet and educator living in New York's Hudson Valley. She has taught and/or administrated with prison education programs (mostly college) since 2005. She's the author of three poetry collections: Visiting Days (Willow Books), Kind (Post Traumatic Press), and Doris' Red Spaces (Mayapple Press), and a chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets (Finishing Line 2007). She co-wrote The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals with Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary co-founder Jenny Brown (Penguin Avery 2012). Her poetry publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, FIELD, Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, New Orleans Review, Rhino, Tampa Review, and many others journals and anthologies.
 
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Konrad Steiner is a San Francisco based experimental filmmaker. He has been making 16mm films since 1981, and since 2004 has been working with musicians and poets on live cinema. From 2004-2006 he was a curator at SF Cinematheque and from 2007-2009 co-produced the Kino21 film series which specialized in documentary and performative cinema. From 1999 to 2012 he made a collaborative film with Leslie Scalapino, creating a feature length film cycle from her reading her book-length poem, “way,” which was the soundtrack. Between 2003 thru 2017 he worked with writers to produce a series of events in SF, Oakland, Santa Cruz, LA, NY, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Providence RI around the practice of live film narration, or “neobenshi” or “the new talkies” or “cinema cabaret.” This is a practice exemplified by the Japanese tradition of the benshi, or live-narrator to silent films. He will discuss the many braids of this tradition moving off in different forms, and demonstrate a live method of taking over modern films with the sound turned off using only language.
 
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March 12
UCSC Creative Writing Student Reading