LHUCA Literary Series featuring Ama Codjoe October 10, 2025

Location: Onsite at LHUCA (511 Avenue K) in the Firehouse Theatre at 7:00 PM

Once per semester, the LHUCA Literary Series features a visiting writer, a TTU graduate writer, and undergraduate writer. Light refreshments will be provided. Our visiting writer for fall 2025 is Ama Codjoe, our graduate writer is Nikki Lyssy, and our undergraduate writer is Amor Costilla.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Willapa Bay AiR, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and a recipient of a 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Nikki Lyssy is a writer from Austin, Texas, specializing in essays and young adult literature. She has work published in HAD/Was, Sweet Literary, and appeared as a guest on the MFA Writers Podcast. Nikki is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in creative nonfiction at Texas Tech University.

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Amor Costilla is a first-gen undergrad at TTU, earning a BA in English with a creative writing concentration. She's also a journalism minor who is just as passionate about fiction and poetry as she is about current political events.