Click this link to see videos of all readings and craft conversations 

CREATIVE WRITING READING SERIES 

Spring 2014

Kaya Oakes

7:30pm, Wednesday, February 19th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Kaya Oakes' third book, a hybrid memoir/ethnography/theological rant, Radical Reinvention, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2012. Her previous nonfiction book, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evoluation of Indie Culture, was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and was selected as a San Francisco Chronicle notable book. She’s also the author of a collection of poetry, Telegraph, which received the Transcontinental Poetry Prize from Pavement Saw Press. In 2002, Kaya co-founded Kitchen Sink Magazine, which received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2003. Currently, she writes about faith and feminism for Commonweal, America, and Killing the Buddha, and is the editor in chief of Limina: A Magazine of Women Writing About Faith on the Margins, which will launch in the summer of 2013. Since 1999, she has taught expository, research, creative nonfiction and narrative journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Kaya has been the recipient of teaching fellowships from the Mellon Faculty Institute and the Bay Area Writing Project, as well as writing awards from the Academy of American Poets.

Joshua Mohr

7:30pm, Wednesday, March 12th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Joshua Mohr is the author of four novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.”  He’s also written Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List.  He lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA program at USF. His latest novel Fight Song was published in February 2013.

Norma Cole

7:30pm,Wednesday, April 9th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2010) is her most recent book of poetry. Other books of poetry include Natural Light, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 and Spinoza in Her Youth. A book of essays and talks, To Be At Music, was published in 2010. Her translations from the French include Jean Daive’s A Woman With Several Lives, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Danielle Collobert’s It Then and Crosscut Universe: Writers on Writing From France. Cole has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2008 she curated an exhibition at the Cue Gallery. Also in 2008, Cole was a Regents’ Lecturer at UC Berkeley. In 2011 she was a columnist at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Open Space” http://blog.sfmoma.org/author/normacole/. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Rosemary Graham & Erin Lindsay McCabe

7:30pm,Wednesday, May 7th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge 

Erin Lindsay McCabe studied Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, earned a teaching credential at California State University, Chico, and taught high school English for seven years before completing her MFA at St. Mary’s College in 2010.  She is currently teaching Composition at Butte College, and eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first novel, I Shall Be Near to You, forthcoming from Crown in 2014.

Rosemary Graham is the author of three novels:  Thou Shalt Not Dump the Skater Dude, My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel, and Stalker Girl. Her essays and commentaries have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Monica Review, and on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."  She is Professor of English and core faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA.

ALL READINGS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

For More information on The Creative Writing Reading Series please contact Sara Mumolo, (925)631-8556 or sm13@stmarys-ca.edu.