For the 44th year, the University of California, Riverside will host Writers Week, California’s longest-running free literary event, on Feb. 13 and Feb. 16-19, 2021. The event will honor three U.S. Poet Laureates and present 32 writers over 16 sessions, the most writers featured since the event’s inception. But what makes this year truly unique is that for the first time in its history, Writers Week will be completely virtual.
The ongoing shutdown of UC Riverside due to COVID-19 was the catalyst for transitioning to a virtual format, but in doing so, has made the event available far beyond the university campus community, Inland Empire and general audience in Southern California who attend annually. The new platform has also allowed for a diverse slate of authors to perform in the event from all around the country and for greater California and national and international attendees to enjoy from the comfort and safety of home.
“In moving online, we had an opportunity to bridge the gap between the beloved live face-to-face regional event and what is possible with virtual presentation,” said Allison Hedge Coke, distinguished professor of creative writing and director of Writers Week. “Faced with the pandemic, we blossomed and quickly moved to do what we do best in presenting fascinating writers from various genres and representing both debut and seasoned nationally and internationally recognized voices in an up close and personal intimate forum — all for free.”
Writers Week will be presented on the video platform Crowdcast allowing for capacity of over 1000 attendees during each session and audience interaction during live Q&A’s. A Facebook Live and YouTube Live will also be broadcast simultaneously. In order to be fully accessible this year, live video captioning and ASL captioning will also be implemented. This online presentation will continue in the years ahead even as in-person events resume, bringing Writers Week to the scale of what many national and international book festivals offer, Hedge Coke said.
Headlining the event are U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Juan Felipe Herrera, who will each be honored with the annual Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) - UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award during a special closing event at 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 19. This is the first time there have been three honorees receiving this award.
“The legacy of these three laureates is incredible,” Hedge Coke said, noting each poet has published award-winning books of poetry for over 40 years. “This luminary trifecta served as the first African American, the first Latinx, and first tribally enrolled citizen of a Native nation appointed as U.S. Poet Laureates, the highest honor for a poet in the United States. Their work for greater good, in providing light to ease troubles, in their generous and great mentorship outreach, and gracious literary presence in shaping the way we view ideals in democracy are represented in their careers and in their compendiums. It is a phenomenal opportunity for us to acknowledge their gifts to our canon and to the world.”
Also featured as this year’s D. Charles Whitney Reader is 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize winner and UCR Emeritus Professor Mike Davis, who will be reading Feb. 18 at 3:30 p.m. with creative writing professor Laila Lalami. Lalami was recently heralded as a “great immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and has received numerous awards including the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize for her body of work.
“Davis is a superpower, deeply engaged in the investigation of labor, widely indicting injustices and practices of the political sphere and contradictions and collusion in pandemics and capitalism, translating our times into malleable materials for contemplation and education,” Hedge Coke said. “His work is the subject of medical papers, appeals to mass media and is coveted in literary review venues.”
American Book Award and California Book Award winner Katen Tei Yamashita, is this year’s Stephen Minot Lecturer, and will be reading with UCR professors Nalo Hopkinson, who was recently named 37th Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; and Allison Benis White, a recent University of North Texas Rilke Prize Winner, at 6:30 p.m. on Feb 16.
“She has delivered an impeccable compendium of essential work,” Hedge Coke said of Yamashita. “Her offerings take us through tumultuous times and journeys of Japanese immigrant experience, American pop culture and Japanese traditions.”
Other writers featured in Writers Week include Millicent Borges Accardi, Kazim Ali, Francisco Aragón, Joseph Cassara, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Camille T. Dungy, Carolyn Dunn, Steve Erickson, Kelli Jo Ford, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, LeAnne Howe, John Jennings, Stephen Graham Jones, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Shin Yu Pai, Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Elizabeth Powell, Kamala Puligandla, Alison C. Rollins, Jane Smiley, Michael Torres, and Melissa Valentine.
Each session will begin with a welcome and an introduction, followed by each writer reading from their latest works. A virtual live Q&A will follow each reading, allowing audience members to ask the speakers questions. Also featured are an MFA reading and UCR’s Writers Resist Reading.
“We have some of the nation’s leading fiction writers, novelists, essayists, biographers, memoirists, and poets, and have built a platform that is prepared to have massive attendance to serve UCR and beyond,” Hedge Coke said. “This year we also have a scene performance from a brand-new play and a talk about work from a film in-progress by two participating directors. There really is something for everyone.”
Guests can view the full schedule and register for each event through the Writers Week website. Each session in the schedule links directly to Crowdcast where attendees can place reservations and return day-of for the event. Guests can also access the full Crowdcast through the link provided at the top of the schedule. All events are free and open to the public. Advanced registration is required.
A special ticketed post-festival celebration will be hosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books the evening of Feb. 20 featuring Lifetime Achievement honorees Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Juan Felipe Hererra.
All presenting authors’ books are available to purchase online through UCR’s campus Barnes and Noble bookstore and at Cellar Door Bookstore.
Find more information and register for events at writersweek.ucr.edu.
Download the Interactive 44th Writers Week Poster and Interactive Lifetime Achievement Honorees Poster.
Writers Week 2021 Schedule
Saturday, February 13th
Pre-festival events
Session 1 | 1:00 p.m. PST
Francisco Aragón
Special Presentation for Puente Project
Session 2 | 3:00 p.m. PST
Stephen Graham Jones
Special Presentation for Native American Student Programs (NASP)
Session 3 | 6:30 p.m. PST
LeAnne Howe and James M. Fortier, cinematographer
Special Presentation On Documentary Film, “Searching for Sequoyah” for Native American Student Programs (NASP)
Tuesday, February 16th
Session 1 | 1:00 p.m. PST
Kelli Jo Ford
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Alison C. Rollins
Session 2 | 3:00 p.m. PST
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Reyna Grande
Elizabeth Powell
Session 3 | 6:30 p.m. PST
Karen Tei Yamashita - Stephen Minot Lecture
Allison Benis White
Nalo Hopkinson
Wednesday, February 17th
Session 1 | 1:00 p.m. PST
Michael Torres
Shin Yu Pai
Steve Erickson
Session 2 | 3:00 p.m. PST
Kazim Ali
Jane Smiley
LeAnne Howe
Session 3 | 6:30 p.m. PST
Camille T. Dungy
Carolyn Dunn
Thursday, February 18th
Session 1 | 12:00 p.m. PST
MFA Reading
Session 2 | 1:30 p.m. PST
Kamala Puligandla
Melissa Valentine
Tommy Pico
Session 3 | 3:30 p.m. PST
Laila Lalami
Mike Davis - D. Charles Whitney Reader
Session 4 | 6:30 p.m. PST
John Jennings
Millicent Borges Accardi
Joseph Cassara
Friday, February 19th
Session 1 | 1:00 p.m. PST
Writers Resist Reading
Session 2 | 3:00 p.m. PST
Craig Santos Perez
Brandy Nālani McDougall
Session 3 | 6:30-8:00 p.m. PST
2021 LA Review of Books (LARB) – UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award Honorees, US Poet Laureates
Rita Dove
Joy Harjo
Juan Felipe Herrera
Saturday, February 20th
Post-festival ticketed celebration
LARB | 4:00-5:30 p.m. PST
2021 LA Review of Books (LARB) – UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award Honorees, US Poet Laureates
Rita Dove
Joy Harjo
Juan Felipe Herrera
Lifetime Achievement Award Honorees
Rita Dove
In 1993, Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, making her the youngest person – and the first African-American – to receive this highest official honor in American Poetry. She served 1993-1995. In 1999 she was reappointed Special Consultant in Poetry for 1999/2000, The Library of Congress Bicentennial year. From 2004-2006, she served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Thomas and Beulah” (1987), author of numerous poetry books, a novel, short stories, a play, and is editor of “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.” Her honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama — the only poet ever to receive both medals — as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Lifetime Achievement Medals from the Liberty of Virginia and the Fulbright Commission, as well as 28 honorary doctorates, and an NAACP Image Award, which she received for her work “Collected Poems: 1974-2004.” She has served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and as chancellor of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. An elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her next volume of poems, “Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in the summer of 2021.
Rita Dove, University of Virginia
Rita Dove, Library of Congress
Photo credit: Fred Viebahn
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo’s nine books of poetry include “An American Sunrise,” “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” “How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems,” and “She Had Some Horses.” Harjo’s memoir “Crazy Brave” won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She co-edited two anthologies of contemporary Native women’s writing: “When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through” and “Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Native Women’s Writing of North America,” one of the London Observer’s Best Books of 1997. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Harjo’s latest is a book of poetry from Norton, “An American Sunrise.” In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Joy Harjo, Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, Blue Flower Arts
Joy Harjo, Library of Congress
Photo credit: Matika Wilbur
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include "Every Day We Get More Illegal"; "Notes on the Assemblage"; "Senegal Taxi"; "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems," a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007." He is also the author of "Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse," which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: "SkateFate," "Calling The Doves," which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; "Upside Down Boy," which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and "Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box." His book "Jabberwalking," a children’s book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.
Juan Felipe Herrera, UCR Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing
Juan Felipe Herrera, Blue Flower Arts
Juan Felipe Herrera, Library of Congress
Photo credit: Carlos Puma
Featured Writers
Millicent Borges Accardi
Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American poet, is the author of three books: “Injuring Eternity,” “Only More So” (Salmon Poetry Ireland 2016) and “Woman on a Shaky Bridge.” Her awards include the NEA, Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, FLAD, and Money for Women (Barbara Deming). Millicent holds degrees in English and writing from CSULB and the University of Southern California.
Photo credit: Miguel Vaz
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry “Inquisition,” “Sky Ward,” winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; “The Far Mosque,” winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; “The Fortieth Day”; “All One’s Blue”; and the cross-genre texts “Bright Felon” and “Wind Instrument.” His novels include the recently published “The Secret Room: A String Quartet” and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir “Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies” and “Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice.” He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled “The Voice of Sheila Chandra” and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, “Northern Light.”
Photo credit: Jesse Sutton-Hough
Francisco Aragón
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. A native of San Francisco, he holds degrees in Spanish from UC Berkeley and NYU and completed graduate degrees in creative writing from UC Davis and the University of Notre Dame. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies where he established Letras Latinas. A CantoMundo fellow and a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Aragón is the author of two books, “Puerta del Sol” and “Glow of Our Sweat,” as well as editor of the anthology, “The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry.” His third book, “After Rubén,” is slated for publication in 2020. “His Tongue a Swath of Sky,” his fourth chapbook, was released in 2019. Previous chapbooks include “Tertulia,” “In Praise of Cities,” and “Light, Yogurt, Strawberry Milk.” His poems and translations have appeared in various print and online journals, as well as numerous anthologies.
Photo credit: Craig Mailloux
Joseph Cassara
Joseph Cassara is the author of “The House of Impossible Beauties,” which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. He is the George & Judy Marcus Chair in Creative Writing and Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.
Photo credit: Amanda Kellis
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) resides in Qualla, North Carolina. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, “Even As We Breathe” is scheduled to release fall of 2020. Her first novel manuscript, “Going to Water” won The Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium in 2012 and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2014. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Clapsaddle returned to teaching English and Cherokee studies at Swain County High School. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.
Photo credit: Terri Clark of Terri Clark Photography
Mike Davis
D. Charles Whitney Reader
Mike Davis was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1998. He was honored for distinguished achievement in nonfiction writing this past fall by the Lannan Literary Foundation and awarded the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for his life’s work as a public intellectual. Professor Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays in the scholarly and elite popular press. His scholarly interest spans urban studies, the built environment, economic history and social movements. Perhaps his best-known book, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” was named a best book in urban politics by the American Political Science Association and won the Isaac Deutscher Award from the London School of Economics and has been translated into eight languages.
Photo credit: Cassandra Davis
Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently “Trophic Cascade”), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection “Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History” , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry” and “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate and Just Plain Sound Great.” A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Carolyn Dunn
Carolyn Dunn is an American Indian artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father’s side, and is Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi on her mother’s. She is an assistant professor at California State University Los Angeles. Her work “Outfoxing Coyote” was recognized by the Wordcraft Circle of Storytellers and Writers as Book of the Year for poetry. Other accolades include the Year’s Best for her short story “Salmon Creek Road Kill,” Native American Music Awards for the Mankillers album “Comin to Getcha,” and the Humboldt Area Foundation. In addition to “Outfoxing Coyote,” her books include “Through the Eye of the Deer,” “Hozho: Walking in Beauty,” and “Coyote Speaks.” Her play “The Frybread Queen,” one of the most talked about new Native theater pieces in the United States, premiered in Los Angeles, after a developmental production at Montana Repertory Theater and at the La Jolla Playhouse.
Photo credit: Nashoba Dunn Anderson
Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels: “Days Between Stations,” “Rubicon Beach,” “Tours of the Black Clock,” “Arc d'X,” “Amnesiascope,” “The Sea Came in at Midnight,” “Our Ecstatic Days,” “Zeroville,” “These Dreams of You” and “Shadowbahn.” He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, “Leap Year” and “American Nomad.” Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock. Currently, he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and a distinguished professor at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.
Photo credit: Lori Precious
Kelli Jo Ford
Kelli Jo Ford lives in Virginia with her husband Scott Weaver, daughter Cypress, and dog Sylvia Plath Weaver-Ford. “Crooked Hallelujah,” her debut novel-in-stories about four generations of Cherokee women, is out now with Grove Press. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and editor, she teaches fiction at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program. “Hybrid Vigor,” a story from Crooked Hallelujah, won The Paris Review’s 2019 Plimpton Prize, and the manuscript for “Crooked Hallelujah” won the University of Central Oklahoma’s 2019 Everett Southwest Literary Award. Ford has been awarded a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, an Elizabeth George Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2016, she served as the Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Ford received an MFA from George Mason University. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
Photo credit: Val Ford Hancock
Reyna Grande
Reyna Grande is the author of two memoirs, “The Distance Between Us” and the much-anticipated sequel, “A Dream Called Home”; and two novels, “Across a Hundred Mountains” and “Dancing with Butterflies,” which were published to critical acclaim. Writing about immigration, family separation, language trauma, the price of the American Dream, and her writing journey, Reyna’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, CNN, The Lily at The Washington Post, and Buzzfeed, among others.
Photo credit: Ara Arbabzadeh
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from South Texas. Her five books include “Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana”; “Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines”; and “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands.” As a correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across the United States, documenting its history. She has won a Luce Scholarship to China, a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. Currently an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a featured author of the International Writing Program.
Photo credit: Alexander Devora
Allison Hedge Coke
Writers Week 2021 Director
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and the 2020 Dan & Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals University of Hawai'i Mānoa, 2019 Fulbright Scholar, 2018 First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poet, 2018 TEDMED Scholar, 2017 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, is the author of numerous books including: “Burn”; “Streaming,” Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, Wordcrafter of the Year Award, Lifetime Achievement Award NWCA, and 2015 IPPY Medal winner; “Off-Season City Pipe,” ( Wordcraft Writer of the Year in Poetry winner; “Dog Road Woman,” American Book Award winner,; “Blood Run”; “Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer”; and a chapbook, “The Year of the Rat.” She has edited numerous anthologies, including: “Effigies III: emerging Queer female Pacific Island poetry”; “Effigies II: emerging Indigenous poetry from the continent”; “Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas” ; “Effigies: New Indigenous Pacific Rim Poetry”; “Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry”; “They Wanted Children”; and “Coming to Life: Poems for Peace in the Aftermath of 9-11.” Her play “Icicles” was a first finalist for the National Repertory Theater Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been translated in multiple languages. She has held several distinguished and endowed positions and her teaching has garnished multiple excellence in teaching awards, including the King*Chavez*Parks Award. Her most recent public projects include: Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined, advising UC Riverside's Writers Resist & Poets Place/Writers Resist UCR Community Garden and #poempromptsforthepandemic daily prompts on IG & FB.
Photo credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz
Nalo Hopkinson
Award-winning Jamaican author Nalo Hopkinson lived in Jamaica, Guyana, the U.S. and Trinidad before moving to Canada as a teenager. She has published six novels and numerous short stories. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of “The House of Whispers,” a serialized comic in Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman Universe”. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton Award, and a two-time recipient of the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her novel “Midnight Robber” received Honorable Mention in Cuba’s Casa de las Americas prize for literature written in Creole. She was just titled the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master for her contributions to science fiction and fantasy.
Photo credit: DC Entertainment
LeAnne Howe
LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the author of novels, plays, poetry, and screenplays. She is the narrator for a PBS documentary, “Indian Country Diaries, Spiral of Fire,” and producer/writer for “Searching for Sequoyah,” airing in 2021. Awards include: the American Book Award; Western Literature Association’s 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award; 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures; and a 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellowship. Howe was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan, Amman in 2010-2011. Her book, “Savage Conversations,” is the story of Mary Todd Lincoln and the Savage Indian that Mary claimed tortured her , which has been staged as a play in NYC, Seattle, and in Athens, Georgia. Two major anthologies released in August are: “Famine Pots: The Choctaw Irish Gift Exchange 1847-Present,” co-edited by Howe and Padraig Kirwan; and, “When The Light of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry,” edited by Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster.
John Jennings
John Jennings is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection “The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art.” Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ current projects include the horror anthology “Box of Bones,” the coffee table book “Black Comix Returns,” and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel “Kindred.” Duffy and Jennings recently released their graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s prescient dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower.” Jennings is also founder and curator of the Abrams Megascope line of graphic novels.
Photo credit: Tarji Smedley
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones has been an NEA fellowship recipient, has won the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Photo credit: Gary Isaacs
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat, Morocco, and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of four novels, including “The Moor’s Account,” which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Her most recent novel, “The Other Americans,” was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and The New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a full professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, a work of nonfiction called “Conditional Citizens,” was published in September 2020.
Photo credit: Jesse Dittmar
Tom Lutz
Publisher of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)
Tom Lutz is the founder and editor of Los Angeles Review of Books. His books include the forthcoming “Aimlessness: An Introduction,” the recently released “Born Slippy: A Novel,” two volumes of travel writing — “Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World: Wandering the Globe from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar” and “And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life in Transit” — as well as “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums,” American Book Award winner, “Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” “Cosmopolitan Vistas,” and “American Nervousness, 1903.” They have been translated into 12 languages and have appeared in numerous publications. He has taught at Stanford University, University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen, and now at UC Riverside. He has written for film and television and is currently creator and executive producer of The Key, a limited series historical drama, currently in development. Lutz is a distinguished professor and chair of the Creative Writing Department at UCR.
Photo credit: David Walter Banks
Brandy Nālani McDougall
Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) is the author of “The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai” and “Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature” as well as the editor of several literary anthologies. She is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.
Photo credit: Craig Santos Perez
Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai, 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee, is the author of ten books of poetry, including “Ensō,” “Aux Arcs,” “Adamantine,” “Sightings,” and “Equivalence.” Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Canada. She served as the fourth poet laureate of the city of Redmond, Washington. Her personal essays have appeared in CityArts, Tricycle, Seattle’s Child, and YES! Magazine. Shin Yu’s visual work has been exhibited at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, The Paterson Museum, The American Jazz Museum, The Three Arts Club of Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and the International Print Center. She is a member of the Mother Load collective. She has served as a poet-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum and produced literary programming for the Crow Collection of Asian Art, the Women’s Museum of Dallas, and the Rubin Museum of Art. She is former assistant curator for the Wittliff Collections. She curates the Lyric World poetry series for Town Hall Seattle. She lives and works in Bitter Lake, Seattle.
Photo credit: Daniel Carrillo
Craig Santos Perez
Craig Santos Perez is a professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, where he teaches creative writing, eco-poetry, and Pacific literature. He is affiliate faculty with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program. He served as Chair of the Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Islander Board in the Office of General Education from 2017-20, and as the Director of the Creative Program from 2014-16 and 2019-20.He earned a B.A. from the University of Redlands, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco, and an MA and Ph.D. in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a faculty member for Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation in 2018, Kundiman Writers Retreat in 2019, and Mokulēʻia Writers Retreat in 2019.
Photo credit: Hannah Ensor
Tommy Pico
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books “IRL,” winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award; “Nature Poem,” winner of a 2018 American Book Award and finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award; “Junk,” finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award; “Feed,” a New York Times Notable book of 2020; and the zine series “Hey, Teebs.” He was the founder and editor-in-chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow; 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry; a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts; was awarded the 2017 Friends of Literature prize from the Poetry Foundation; and won a 2018 Whiting Award. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now splits his time between Los Angles and Brooklyn. He co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude , co-hosts the podcasts "Food 4 Thot" and "Scream, Queen!," is poetry editor at Catapult Magazine, writes for the FX show "Reservation Dogs," and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. @heyteebs
Photo credit: Niqui Carter
Elizabeth Powell
Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including the forthcoming, “ATOMIZER.” Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances,” was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker. Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues,” was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cortland Review, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Green Mountains Review, and associate professor and chair of writing and literature at Northern Vermont University-Johnson. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. In 2020, she will be Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the Oregon State University-Bend MFA program.
Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
Kamala Puligandla
Kamala Puligandla writes fiction, essays, and other ditties. Puligandla’s first novel, “Zigzags,” is out now. Puligandla’s novella, “You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone,” is forthcoming. Puligandla is the editor-in-chief of the queer website Autostraddle. Puligandla attended Oberlin College received an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside, and has attended workshops and residencies at Community of Writers, VONA, The Vermont Studio Centers, The Home School, This Will Take Time and Kundiman. Pugligandla lives in Los Angeles and is from Oakland, California.
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Alison C. Rollins
Alison C. Rollins holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in St. Louis, she currently works as the lead teaching and learning librarian for Colorado College. She also serves as faculty for Pacific Northwest College of Art’s low-residency MFA. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has most recently been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship as well as a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection “Library of Small Catastrophes” is out now.
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Jane Smiley
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, essayist, and biographer, Jane Smiley is the author of more than twenty fiction and nonfiction books. Smiley is a lecturer who speaks on a wide variety of topics, including politics, farming, child rearing, and literature. Two of Jane Smiley’s novels have been made into movies: “A Thousand Acres,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and “The Age of Grief,” which was developed into “The Secret Lives of Dentists.” The recipient of an MFA and a Ph.D., Jane Smiley is the author of many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Practical Horseman, and others. She has been a Fulbright Scholar and was a professor of English for 15 years at Iowa State University, where she taught creative writing workshops at the undergraduate and graduate level. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001, and in 2006 she was awarded the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
Photo credit: Jane Smiley
Michael Torres
Michael Torres is a VONA distinguished alum and CantoMundo fellow. A winner of the Loft Mentor Series, he received an Individual Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was awarded a Jerome Foundation Research and Travel Grant to visit the pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico where his father grew up. Fellowships and awards include National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Loft Literary Center for the Mirrors & Windows Program, 2020 McKnight Writing Fellowship, and Artist-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. His debut poetry collection, “An Incomplete List of Names,” was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and listed in NPR’s Best Books of 2020. His writing is featured in numerous publications as well as “The Slowdown” with Tracy K. Smith, and NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast. Torres was born in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. Currently, he teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Photo credit: Matt Mead
Melissa Valentine
Melissa Valentine’s debut memoir, “The Names Of All The Flowers,” was named the 2019 winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and is forthcoming July 2020. A writer and an editor from Oakland, California, Valentine received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Jezebel, Apogee, Niche, Friends Journal, Sassafras, and Blackberry. She was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest and her work received honorable mention for the Ardella Mills Nonfiction Award. Valentine has also been a fellow at the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. She is currently executive editor at Callisto Media in New York. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Allison Benis White
Allison Benis White is the author of “Please Bury Me in This,” winner of the UNT Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIE Book of the Year Award; and “Small Porcelain Head,” selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry, and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, “Self-Portrait with Crayon,” received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets & Writers magazine. She is an associate professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Photo credit: Steve White
Karen Tei Yamashita
Stephen Minot Lecture
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” “Brazil-Maru,” “Tropic of Orange,” “Circle K Cycles,” “I Hotel,” “Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance,” and “Letters to Memory,” all published by Coffee House Press. “I Hotel” was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She received a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship and is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Photo credit: Howard Boltz
