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
Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 7:30pm in Le Fevre Theater
Why Poetry? How Form? An evening to celebrate new books from Robert Hass and Matthew Zapruder, introduction by Brenda Hillman.
Robert Hass is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. As Poet Laureate he founded the program River of Words, now a part of Saint Mary’s College’s own Center for Environmental Literacy. He is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his most recent collection of essays is A Little Book on Form.
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear and Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry. He is also the author of three other collections of poetry, American Linden, The Pajamaist, and Come On All You Ghosts. The Pajamaist was selected as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. Come On All You Ghosts was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and was also selected as the 2010 Booklist Editors' Choice for poetry, as well as the Northern California Independent Booksellers poetry book of the year. An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books.
Monday, October 9, 2017 at 7:30pm in Hagerty Lounge, De La Salle Hall
Co-sponsored with the Campus Committee on Inclusive Excellence, the English Department, the MFA in Creative Writing, the Kalmanovitz School of Education, the Los Gatos Irish Writers' Festival, the School of Liberal Arts, and the Women’s Resource Center.
Writing the World: From Struggle to Joy
Kathy D'Arcy, Stephen Connolly, and Stephen Sexton – will join Afro-Latinx writer, Raina León, in the rebellious act of telling their own stories. Each writer’s work reflects the dynamic and diasporic experiences of nostalgia, resistance, and home connectedness, through language that defies erasure of self, and dares us all to act. The reading will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Rosemary Graham.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 7:30pm in Moraga Room, Soda Center
The Roy E. and Patricia Disney Forum presents an evening with Tyehimba Jess.
This event is also made possible by the following cosponsors: the Campus Committee on Inclusive Excellence; the Catholic Institute for Lasallian Social Action; Collegiate Seminar; the Communications Department; the English Department; and the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts
The evening will include an introduction by Matthew Zapruder and a reading and preformance from Tyehimba Jess, followed by a Q/A with Jess and Zapruder. Matthew Zapruder is Associate Professor of English and Poetry Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Saint Mary's. He serves as Editor-at-Large for Wave Books, the publisher of Jess' 2017 Pulitzer Prize poetry collection, Olio.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olio. Jess's Olio, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the 2017 Book Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors. It was also a finalist for the 2016 National Books Critics Circle Award, 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Library Journal called it a "daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture" and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it "Encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant" and selected it as one of the five best poetry books of 2016. Jess is the Poetry and Fiction Editor of the African American Review and is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Wednesday, November 15, 2017 at 7:30pm, Hagerty Lounge, De La Salle Hall
Gabrielle Selz is an award-winning author. Her debut memoir Unstill Life, published by W.W. Norton in 2014, received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and was listed as one of the best books of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, MORE Magazine, the L.A. Times, and Newsday. She writes art criticism for Art Papers, Hyperallergic, and the Huffington Post. Selz is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction and was a New York Moth Story Slam Winner. Selz is currently writing the biography of the artist, Sam Francis.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018 at 7:30pm, Hagerty Lounge, De La Salle Hall
Shanthi Sekaran lives in Berkeley, California. Her latest novel, Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read and an Amazon Editors' Pick. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, Huffington Post and Best New American Voices. She's a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto and a Distinguished Visiting Writer in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction at Saint Mary’s College. www.shanthisekaran.com
Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 7:30pm, Hagerty Lounge, De La Salle Hall
Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon and The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Brynn is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and a California State Library Civil Liberties grant. Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Originally from Fresno, CA, Saito is the Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College.
Talks on craft, publishing & life after the MFA.
All talks take place in Hagerty Lounge at 2:30pm and are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Creating Story in Memoir and Biography by Gabrielle Selz
This talk will focus on how to shape and condense life into a structured story. In other words, turning life, yours or another’s, into art. How do we shape a narrative that is factually accurate while also “feeling” true to the experience of reading? How do we marry chronology and evidence to a scaffolding of larger contexts and themes? This talk will look at ways to bring our creative imaginations to bear on history. Examples of biographies and memoirs, including works by Edmund de Wall, Susan Faludi, Leslie Jamison, Honor Moore and Poe Ballantine, will be discussed. Novelistic techniques such as psychological insights and dramatic sweep will be examined as they relate to narrative nonfiction. The biographer Phyllis Rose writes that “the magic of a great book is that it makes its own subject seem inevitable.” She asks us, “Did women in playgrounds exist before Grace Paley?” This Craft Conversation will look at ways to create such inevitability in our subjects and our stories.
Gabrielle Selz is an award-winning author. Her debut memoir Unstill Life, published by W.W. Norton in 2014, received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and was listed as one of the best books of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Understanding Your Character’s Yearnings and Desires, Understanding Your Story by Andrew Lam
So much of writing is about human longing and wishes, especially in the short story form. One way to explore the shape of fiction writing is to explore the various dimensions of one’s character’s inner life and secrets. It is a way toward understanding motivation and how it can move a story forward, giving it shape. In this Workshop, writer Andrew Lam, an accomplished essayist and a short story writer, will discuss his process of coming up with a character and how their inner lives drive the narrative.
Andrew Lam is the web editor of New America Media. His collection of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, received the PEN Open Book Award. East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, a meditation on how Asian immigration changed the West, was named Top Ten Indies by Shelf Unbound Magazine. Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short fiction about Vietnamese newcomers struggling to remake themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area won the Josephine Miles award for fiction.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
For Love and Money by Manjula Martin
Is literature an art, or is it a profession? Every working writer is in a constant state of negotiation between creativity and commerce, life and work, love and money. This talk will explore how literary authors might navigate such seemingly opposing aspects of their work. We'll look at a few examples and strategies for balancing the “writing life” with real life—and creating a sustainable literary career in the process.
Manjula Martin is managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story. She is also editor of the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living (Simon & Schuster 2017).
SPRING
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Intimate Ecologies: Crisis, Community, and the Poem by Brynn Saito
This talk will inquire into the limits, complexities, and possibilities of community-based poetry and poetics in this moment of social and economic precarity. Drawing on recent work with the Yonsei Memory Project—an arts-based initiative surfacing connections between the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and current civil liberties debates—we’ll explore a number of threads, questions: What is the role of poem-making and poem-speaking in maintaining communal memory? What are the implications of considering the poet as diagnoser, preserver, creator, or disrupter within a particular collective? Considering “community” as one form of public intimacy/assembly, we’ll ask: can the poem, too, enact a coalitional space and way of loving? We’ll move through a variety of fields (zen buddhism; critical theory) and conjure writings by Judy Grahn, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and others in order to trace these lines of inquiry.
Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013). Brynn is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and a California State Library Civil Liberties grant. Saito is the 2018 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
To Boldly Go: Writing Fiction That Lies Outside of Your Experience by Shanthi Sekaran
This talk explores the possibility of shedding the old “Write what you know” directive, and venturing into the thorny, daunting but potentially vivifying process of writing what you want to know. Over seven years of writing and researching Lucky Boy, I taught myself to think about and execute the task of writing a story vastly different from my own. The process raised endless questions. Where does research end and creation begin? How do you create a story that feels alive when you haven’t lived it yourself? Which limitations can you transcend, and which will you simply have to accept? How might you best avoid the pitfalls of cultural appropriation? The human experience is rich with stories that take us out of our own small worlds. This talk will introduce techniques of writing and thought with which to expand your narrative universe.
Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read and an Amazon Editors' Pick. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, Huffington Post and Best New American Voices. Sekaran is the 2017-2018 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Creative Nonfiction and Fiction in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Straddling the Boundaries: What We Can Learn from Jo Ann Beard? by Natalie Baszile
Jo Ann Beard’s collection, Boys of My Youth, is categorized as Essays/Memoir, but is it really? In this talk, we will do a close reading of Beard’s essay, “Cousins,” to discover the lessons her work offers to fiction and nonfiction writers alike. Please read the essay in advance; copies will be available at the talk.
Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel, Queen Sugar, which was named one of the San Francisco Chronicle's’ Best Books of 2014, was long-listed for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Natalie Baszile is the 2018 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Fiction in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Events
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Sep
27Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 2:30 P.M.
De La Salle Hall: Hagerty Lounge...
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Oct
7Saturday, October 7, 2017 - 12 P.M.
WATERSHED ENVIRONMENTAL POETRY FESTIVAL is a collaboration of Robert Hass, Poetry Flash...
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Oct
11Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - 2:30 P.M.
De La Salle Hall: Hagerty LoungeUnderstanding Your Character’s Yearnings and Desires, Understanding Your Story by...
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Oct
23Monday, October 23, 2017 - 4 P.M.
Faculty Staff Dining RoomOne of the biggest obstacles any writer faces is finishing the first draft of a novel....