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
Spring Readings
Afternoon Conversations
September 19, 2018, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Kevin Young is the Director for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark, and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (2018); Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
October 24, 2018, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Tongo Eisen-Martin
November 7, 2018, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Samina Ali is an award-winning author, activist and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, won France’s prestigious Prix du Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. Ali’s work is driven by her belief in personal narrative as a force for achieving women’s individual and political freedom and in harnessing the power of media for social transformation. She is the curator of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed virtual exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices. Her current project, a memoir of her near-death experience delivering her firstborn, takes an unsparing look at gender bias and the crisis of preventable maternal deaths in the U.S. Ali is a former cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Daily Beast. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Born in 
New York City, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. Her novel, The Golem of Seoul, is forthcoming from Ecco / Harper Collins.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Lori Ostlund’s first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World, won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. Stories from it appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O Henry Prize Stories and in literary journals such as ZYZZYVA and New England Review. Her second book, After the Parade (Scribner, 2015), was a B&N Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is at work on her next two novels and a second story collection. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats, though she grew up in a hardware store in Minnesota, cat-less.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019, 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge
Jane Gregory is from Tucson and lives in Oakland. She is the author of Yeah No and My Enemies, both from The Song Cave, as well as several chapbooks. Her work has been most recently published or reviewed in The Believer, Omniverse, and The New York Times. She is co-editor and co-founder (with Lyn Hejinian and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press, and she works for Small Press Distribution.
Talks on craft, publishing & life after the MFA.
All talks take place in Hagerty Lounge (unless otherwise noted) at 2:30pm and are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 in the Museum of Art at 2:30pm
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Details TBD.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 1pm-2:30pm
Irish Poet Panel with Leanne O’Sullivan
One of the most politically charged acts a people can do is read and write for themselves. Visiting Irish writers, including Leanne O'Sullivan, will share one poem and their ruminations on a panel that explores the displays of power and violence in myth and beyond it. In this conversation, O'Sullivan will explicitly respond to selections from Hannah Arendt's essay "On Violence" in her work and in her reading of the contemporary moment. Conversation facilitated by Rosemary Graham.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 in Hagerty at 2:30pm
The Art of Spinning Tales by Samina Ali
Anna Quindlen famously said, "Every story has already been told ... there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." The idea that every good story has already been told is a sentiment many share. When writing your story, how do you put that all-important personal spin on an old story in order to transform it into a fresh tale, infusing it with unique insight that not only captivates your audience but also sets your work apart?
In this craft talk, author Samina Ali invites author Christine Lee to join her in order to show how two authors take on a similar topic in very different ways. Samina's recently completed memoir, "72 Virgins," chronicles how, at the age of 29, as a result of giving birth to her son, Ali suffered multiple organ failure and massive brain damage from multiple strokes. Christine's recently released memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember, is about her own journey of having suffered a massive stroke at the age of 33. Both writers are women. Both are Asian American. And both are writing memoirs about brain recovery. So, what makes these two books vastly different from one another? What did each writer bring to the table that the other didn't, and what did they each bring to the table that "no one else in the history of time ever has"?
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Navigating Point of View: Moving in Closer on 3rd-Person Close by Lori Ostlund
I tend to design craft talks around the questions that most come up in workshops, and the topic of 3rd-close POV certainly begets questions, perhaps because POV is one of the first decisions we make about a new piece yet one of the most complicated. Writers often (mistakenly) assume that widening the distance between the narrator and the character means rendering the narrator invisible, even bland. In this craft lecture, we will define 3rd-close on a spectrum, discussing when to move closer and when to maintain more distance, strategies for signaling distance, and methods for achieving more nuanced interiority. The talk will be interactive.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Building Worlds by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
We are building worlds when we write, whether it is the curation of our nonfiction work or the imaginative settings of fiction. Even when the world is based on our lives, we are presenting that world to the reader with an embedded lesson and story, one that can vary from writer to writer and story to story. How do we go about consciously and conscientiously building our worlds? What do we address and include in our world building and tie it back to the purpose of our characters? And moreover--how do we play and have fun doing so? In my craft talk, I will go over these high level questions, as well as provide a literal hands-on exercise to help with your process.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Thinking Otherwise and its Occasions: Grief, Form, and the Telepathic Promise of Poetry by Jane Gregory
This talk explores how poetic form metabolizes loss—how it renders it, renders it otherwise, renders the organs or faculties that experience it otherwise too. So, it takes up—among other things—the serial poem and the undead; the way that, if “music is wounded kinship’s last resort,” as Nathaniel Mackey writes, rhyme can be its scar. Alice Notley activates what she calls “a disallowed metaphysics” in a poem that ends: “grief isn’t a word I’m not a person.” Elsewhere she claims that if you read her work in the right way it will give you telepathic powers. Agnes Martin also claims that if you approach her paintings right, something like telepathy will be enabled. This talk, then, looks at some work by Mackey, Notley, Martin, and Robert Duncan, as well as a few of my own poems, to test all of these propositions.
Events
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Sep
26Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 12 P.M.
Prospective and current students need to know that they can pay for their graduate...
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Sep
26Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 1 P.M.
Soda Activity Center: PatioThe English Department's annual welcome event for students. A fun English Tea Party,...
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Sep
26Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 2:30 P.M.
Saint Mary's College Museum of ArtMirrors In Every Place...
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Oct
10Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - 1 P.M.
Saint Mary's College Museum of ArtUsing a short selection from Matthew Zapruder’s book Why Poetry, two distinguished...
Last updated by Emily Alexander on August 7th, 2018