Texas Tech University

Creative Writing Reading Series

The Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech hosts an annual reading series with performances given by five to ten visiting, faculty, and student writers. We will be hosting some in-person events this year, but as this COVID-19 pandemic endures, we will also be offering many virtual events and live-streaming our face-to-face events. It's important that writers combat the isolation we're all experiencing right now. Stay connected with other artists by attending one of our events—in-person or online. Per CDC recommendations, masks are encouraged for in-person events. 

If you are going to give a virtual reading, or would like to suggest one to list on this page, please email Marcus Burke (marcus.burke@ttu.edu).

 

Spring 2024 Reading Series

Upcoming Events

February 15

Emmy Pérez

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Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of With the River on Our Face and Solstice. Her Paper america: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2025. In 2022, she was a USA Fellow, and she a past recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Academy of American Poets, and CantoMundo. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she has lived in the Texas borderlands for over 20 years and has been a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop since 2008. Currently, she is a professor of Creative Writing and holds the Dr. Robert S. Nelsen Professorship in Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

To register for Zoom access, follow this link

February 29

Colin Channer

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Colin Channer was born in Jamaica, and educated there, and in New York. His ten books as fiction writer, poet and editor include Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Finalist for a 2023 New England Book Award. His prose and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bomb, The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly and other venues. Channer's Recent honors include a 2023 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poet's & Writers Magazine; a 2022 Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library; a 2019 Amy Clampitt Residency; and a 2018 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Director of Graduate Studies.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

To register for Zoom access, follow this link

March 21

Tómas Morín

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Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection Machete (Knopf, 2021); the memoir Let Me Count the Ways (Univ. of Nebraska, 2022); and a collection of literary letters entitled Where Are You From: Letters to My Son (Univ of Nebraska, 2024).  His first collection of poetry A Larger Country was the winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize and runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Patient Zero, his second poetry collection, was described by Publishers Weekly in a starred review as "striking in capturing everyday actions with startling, musical wit." His individual essays and poems have appeared, among many journals, in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.  With Mari L'Esperance, he co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, a book that explores the art and value of Philip Levine's five decades of teaching. In his work as a translator, Morín translated Pablo Neruda's visionary The Heights of Macchu Picchu, as well as Luisa Pardo & Gabino Rodriguez's libretto Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance, a magisterial opera composed by Graham Reynolds. His awards include a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2022 NEA Fellowship. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Associate Chair of the English Department at Rice University.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

March 28

Aron Aji

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Aron Aji is a native of Turkey, and has translated works by modern and contemporary Turkish writers. Best known for his translations of Bilge Karasu's fiction, he has received the National Translation Award for Karasu's The Garden of Departed Cats, and was a finalist for PEN Translation prize for Karasu's A Long Day's Evening. He and David Gramling (as co-translators) received the 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize for Murathan Mungan's Valor: Stories (2022). Aji's most recent translations include Ferit Edgü's Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, Efe Duyan's poetry volume, The Behavior of Words, and his co-translation with Selin Gökçesu of Ebru Ojen's Lojman. Aji is the director of Translation Programs at the University of Iowa, and co-directs UI's Center for Translation and Global Literacy, a US-DOE national resource center.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

To register for Zoom access, follow this link

April 4

Wendy S. Walters

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Wendy S. Walters, a nonfiction writer, poet, and librettist, is a Creative Capital awardee in literary nonfiction, as well as an Associate Professor of Nonfiction at Columbia University. She is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014), and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press). She recently co-curated an exhibition, "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her lyrical work has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Joe's Pub, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, The Institute for Advanced Study, and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and her creative writing has appeared in places such as BOMB, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and Harper's. She is currently finishing a book about paint.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

To register for Zoom access, follow this link

April 12

Sara Sams, Gigi Cheng, and Jennifer Loyd

April 18

Lucy Schiller and Brock Allen

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Lucy Schiller is a nonfiction writer and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Columbia Journalism Review, The Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, West Branch, Popula, DIAGRAM, Speculative Nonfiction, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is nonfiction editor at Double Negative, a new literary press, and is completing a book to be published at Flatiron Books. She is also at work on a collection of essays about music, gender, and performance, as well as a book-length essay on digression. Her work has been supported by Colgate University, where she was Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in nonfiction from 2020-2021, and the University of Iowa, where she was a Provost's Visiting Writer in Nonfiction, as well as an Iowa Arts Fellow. She received her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

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Brock Allen is an essayist from Montana currently living in Lubbock, Texas, where he is a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University. His essays can be found or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere.

Location: Onsite in Humanities Room 001 at 7:30 PM

To register for Zoom access, follow this link