Creative Writing Reading Series

2020-2021 TTU Creative Writing Program Reading Series

 

Fall 2020 Semester Reading Series

October 1

Emmy Pérez

Emmy Pérez's event on October 1st at 7:30PM (CST) will take place online via YouTube Live. Click here to access the livestream.

Photo by Paul Chouy

Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press). A collection of her new and selected poetry is forthcoming from TCU Press. Pérez is the recipient of a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets and previous poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also received the Modesta Avila Award, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, and the James D. Phelan Award. Currently, she is full Professor of Creative Writing at UTRGV and teaches MFA and undergraduate creative writing courses. In 2016, she was awarded a Faculty Excellence Award in Student Mentoring, and in 2012, a UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award. She also serves as Associate Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies and is an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American Studies.

October 8 — Creative Writing Program Faculty and Graduate Student Reading

The TTU CW Faculty and Graduate Student Reading on October 8th at 7:30 PM (CST) will take place online via YouTube Live. Click here to access the livestream.

Jacqueline Kolosov

Jacqueline Kolosov has published 3 books of poetry. Her 4th, Prevail, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in late 2021. She has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose and has published several novels for teens. 7 of her essays have been Notables with essays, stories as well as craft pieces having appeared in journals such as The Moth, The Sewanee Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Writer's Chronicle, and Terrain.org. The coeditor of 3 anthologies, the most recent is Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Investigation of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres.

Brook McClurg

Brook McClurg received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University (Fiction) and an MFA from Rutgers University-Camden (Nonfiction). Originally from Southern California, he is currently pursuing a PhD at Texas Tech, where his research interests focus on Hybrid nonfiction, Lyric narratives, LatinX Literature, and translation. His work has appeared in Exposition Review, Pidgeonholes, HeartWood Literary Magazine, & others.

Caleb Braun

Caleb Braun holds an MA in English from the University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Crab Orchard Review, The Atlanta Review, The Columbia Review, Harpur Palate, Arcturus, and elsewhere.

Noam Dorr

Noam Dorr is an assistant professor in the Department of English. He is the author of Love Drones (Sarabande Books 2019), and his work has also appeared in Gulf Coast, Seneca Review, Passages North, and other places. Dorr is a former Fulbright scholar, received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.

 

October 29 — nothing yet

November 19th — A Reading and Conversation with Danielle Evans and Naomi Jackson

This event on November 19th at 7:30PM (CST) will take place online via YouTube Live. Click to access the livestream: https://youtu.be/nM7CRgDGPPM

Danielle Evans

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

At just 26 years old, Danielle Evans burst onto the literary scene in 2010 with her breakout story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Winner of the PEN American Award for first fiction and the Hurston Wright Award, Evans was named a "5 Under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation. Now, ten years later, Evans's new collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, coming from Riverhead on November 10, 2020, has drawn high praise, including Roxane Gay's declaration that she is indeed "the finest short story writer working today." The Office of Historical Corrections tells the stories of characters, many now in their 30s and struggling with finding love, settling into an identity, losing a parent, and reckoning with how history haunts us, personally and collectively, as an individual and a nation. A "startlingly good sociocultural mimic" (Boston Globe), Evans showcases her "blisteringly smart" (Time) voice and unique gift to zoom into particular moments and relationships that also speak to larger issues around race, gender and identity. Through richly drawn characters and razor-sharp prose, Evans tells intensely intimate stories that are as timely as they are timeless, as funny as they are devastating and as pleasurable as they are painful. Evans's work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Naomi Jackson

Photo by Lola Flash

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association's Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org, and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side "a gem of a book." Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad, including Harper's, The Washington Post, brilliant corners, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Writer. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

November 26th — nothing yet

December 3rd — nothing yet

December 4th — LHUCA Literary Reading Series feat. Joy Priest, Emma Aylor, and Kit Aldridge

This event is on December 4th at 7:30 PM. Register for the event via Zoom: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsf-qtqzotHtP4kitIoFeAhYbHWJYaENiQ

Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her essays have appeared in Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, 2020), and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. Priest received her B.S. in Journalism from the University of Kentucky, her M.F.A in Poetry, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies, from the University of South Carolina, and she is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Read Joy's work and order her book here: https://www.joypriest.com/

Emma Aylor

Emma Aylor's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah's 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington–Seattle and is a work on a PhD at Texas Tech University.

Read Emma's recent work here: https://emmaaylor.com/poems/

Kit Aldridge

Kit Aldridge is a senior in the Creative Writing program at TTU from the Dallas area. After coming to college, her love for reading and writing was reignited, and she hopes to make a career out of her passion.

Spring 2021 Semester Reading Series