Visiting Writers Lecture Series

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, artist, and editor. She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness, Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an experimental novel, Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), a book-length meditation and ekphrasis on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), a lyrical essay reflecting on the death of Lee’s mother, and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of travel essays inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. She is currently Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, Founder and Executiv

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social engagement interaction(s), they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. They define writing as art that has storytelling at its core, but may express itself in hybrid, performance, visual, musical/aural, and interdisciplinary forms. This event includes: Vi Khi Nao, Stacey Tran, and Dao Strom. Vi Khi Nao is the author of the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. This Fall 2019, she is BMI Shearing Fellow. Stacey Tran is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. Dao Strom is the author of the

Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She has worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history, and politics. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press.

Jos Charles is author of feeld, a National Book Award long-listed finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions) and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press). Charles has poetry published with POETRY, Poem-a-Day, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Charles' writing has been featured on BitchMedia, Entropy, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. In 2016 she received the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. In 2015 she received the Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. From 2013-2018 she served as the founding-editor for THEM lit, a trans literary journal. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, CA.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don't Dance No Mo' (Random House, 2020).

Aisha was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and published in 2017; it is also the winner of the CLMP Firecracker award for nonfiction. A contributing editor for Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, her writing can be found in publications like Autostraddle, Guernica, Callaloo and The Paris Review. She recently joined the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan as a Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction.

Jess Arndt received an MFA at Bard College and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. Arndt’s writing has recently appeared in THEM journal, The LA Review of Books, Lithub, Hazzlitt, Fence, BOMB, and Night Papers, among others. Their debut story collection, Large Animals, came out on Catapult Press in May, 2017. Arndt is a co-founder of New Herring Press and she/they currently teach at CalArts, in Los Angeles.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize) and Rocket Fantastic, which will be released by Persea Books in September 2017. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award, a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review, and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals including the New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review. She is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and co-curates the digital maker's space Voluble. She is working on a memoir entitled The Year I Didn't Kill Myself, and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. She lives in North Carolina and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. It was selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year," and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere.She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a

Esther G. Belin is an award-winning Diné poet and multimedia artist. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Wicazo Sa Review, BOMB, Democracy Now!, and Studies in American Indian Literatures. She considers the following locations her homeland: LA, Durango, Diné bike'yah. Her writing and art grows from and is an offering to the collective humanity, bila' ashdla'ii.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as the recently released Prose Architectures, her first monograph of drawings, and Calamities, a collection of linked auto-essays on the intersections of writing, drawing, and community, which won the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, and n+1. A 2014-15 fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and a 2017 Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in Marfa, TX, she makes work in New Englan

Madeline ffitch writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio. She was a founding member of the punk theater company, The Missoula Oblongata, and is the author of the story collection, Valparaiso, Round the Horn. Her writing is featured or forthcoming at Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, Granta, Vice, and Big Big Wednesday. Her first novel, Stay and Fight, will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring 2019.

Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean-American writer and translator living in Chicago. His other poetry books are In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, The Book of Interfering Bodies, The Ecstasy of Capitulation, and the chapbook Failure in the Imagination. Lake Michigan is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. He has published one collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales. His books of translation include Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun.

Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, most recently Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, (Nightboat Books), a book that blends cultural close reading and dicey autobiography, for which he received a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. His collections of poems are Not Even Then (University of California Press) and A Several World (Nightboat Books), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Pratt Institute, University of Montana, Cal Arts, and University of Arizona in Tucson, where he was also creator and host of Speedway and Swan Poetry Radio. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho and lives with his partner John in Moscow, Idaho.

John Keene’s most recent books include the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received a 2016 American Book Award, a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and in March 2017 the UK's inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize; the art book GRIND (ITI Press, 2016), an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner; and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016). He is also the translator of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books / A Bolha Editora, 2014), and other works of fiction and poetry. He chairs the department of African American and African Studies, and also teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.

francine j. harris is the author of play dead. Her first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, is a Cave Canem poet, and Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize, Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2017). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. His Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations, an online album, exists on The Conversant. His short films “Grey,” “White,” “Blue,” “Red,” “Green,” “Brown,” “Pink,” “Black,” can also be found online at the Center for Art and Thought. Wilson is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-direc

Sara Jaffe's first novel, Dryland, was published by Tin House Books in September 2015. Her short fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including Fence, BOMB, NOON, Paul Revere’s Horse, matchbook, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.

Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), a National Book Award winner. She is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California. Lewis is also a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A previous finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published her work in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

TC Tolbert often identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, dancer, and poet but really s/he’s just a human in love with humans doing human things. The author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014) and 3 chapbooks, TC is also co-editor (along with Trace Peterson) of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013). S/he is Core Faculty in the low residency MFA program at OSU-Cascades and spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. His favorite thing in the world is Compositional Improvisation (which is another way of saying being alive). www.tctolbert.com