Innovative voices
Creative Writing Reading Series
Sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing, authors from around the world come to Saint Mary’s for readings, conversation, and community. All events are free and open to the public.
Fall Readings
Craft Conversations
Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 2:30pm via Zoom
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree won the Silver Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor's choice. her writing as appear in the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Buzzfeed, The Believer, Nylon, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
Wednesday, November 4 2020, 2:30pm via Zoom
Nicole Chung's national bestselling debut memoir All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, NPR, TIME, and Library Journal, among many others. Nicole has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, TIME, Longreads, Vulture, and Hazlitt, and has taught writing workshops for Kundiman, Catapult, and PEN/Faulkner's Writers in Schools program. She is the editor in chief of the National Magazine Award-winning Catapult magazine, co-editor of the immigration anthology A Map Is Only One Story, and the former managing editor of the beloved, now-shuttered website The Toast.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, teacher, and editor. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from Best of the Net, Independent Publisher Book Awards, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She is presently fiction editor at Pleiades, and was formerly poetry editor and contest editor at Missouri Review. She received her PhD in creative writing & literature from the University of Missouri. Her cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF was released in 2017 on Stalking Horse Press. She teaches at the Univeristy of Houston-Clear Lake.
Talks on craft, publishing, & life after the MFA.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 2:30pm via Zoom
How to Write About Disaster with Marie Mutsuki Mockett
We are living through a disaster—but it’s not the only disaster. This class will examine how to write about a disaster in ways that don’t make the disaster feel overwhelming, or force the writer into a narrative that feels to pat. What are examples of good disaster writing and what is the writer’s responsibility in his work during times of disaster?
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye examines grief against the backdrop of the 2011 Great East Earthquake in Japan and was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, Indies Choice Best Book for Nonfiction and the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her new work, American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland, published by Graywolf in April, 2020, follows her journey through seven heartland states in the company of evangelical Christian harvesters, and examines the role of GMOs, God, agriculture, and race in society.
Events
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Feb
17Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - 2 P.M.
Join us for a craft conversation with MFA's visiting writer, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo...
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Feb
24Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 2 P.M.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s most recent book is Children of the Land: a Memoir, ...
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Mar
17Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 2 P.M.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's most recent novel, The Revisioners, won an NAACP Image...