University of Connecticut
Creative Writing Program of the English Department
Visiting Authors, Fall 2018- Spring 2019
All readings are free and open to the public
Long River Reading Series: Dates, Times, and Location TBD
Come on down for our ever-popular reading series showcasing an open mic and feature readers! Bring a poem, short prose piece, or music to share at the open mic; enjoy coffee, tea, and snacks with other members of the UConn Creative Writing community. Everyone is welcome.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Brian Sneeden/ Poetry Reading
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center, 6:00 pm
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the UConn Bookstore.
Brian Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection Last City (2018). A 2018 PEN/Heim recipient, his poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and translations of his poems have been published in international magazines in Greek, Italian, Albanian, and Serbian. His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s poetry collection, Homerica (2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 in The Paris Review. Brian received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he held a Poe/Faulkner Fellowship in creative writing and served as poetry editor for Meridian. He is the senior editor of New Poetry in Translation.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Shane McCrae/Aetna Writer-in-Residence
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center, 6:00 pm
Co-sponsored with the Aetna Chair of Writing and the UConn Bookstore.
Shane McCrae is the author of six books of poetry–most recently, In the Language of My Captor (2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award, and The Gilded Auction Block (2018). He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Jon Andersen/Poetry Reading
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center, 6:00 pm
**This event is a benefit for the Covenant Soup Kitchen in Willimantic. Audience members are invited to make a donation after the reading.**
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the UConn Bookstore.
Jon Andersen’s books include The Burden Note (2014), an English/Serbo-Croatian chapbook; and Stomp and Sing (2005). He is the editor of the anthology Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other U.S.A. (2008). His poems have appeared in print and online publications, including The Café Review, Chiron Review, Connecticut Review, Counterpunch, Exposition Review, Freshwater, HeART, Here, North American Review, The Progressive, Rattle, and The Worcester Review, among others. He has given readings and delivered workshops to a wide variety of audiences at events throughout the eastern United States, the United Kingdom, and Serbia, including the Ledbury Poetry Festival (2008), the 49th International Festival of Literature in Belgrade (2012), and the 42nd Smederevo Poetry Autumn (2014). For twelve years he was a high school English and special education teacher, and since 2008 he has been a professor of English at Quinebaug Valley Community College in Danielson and Willimantic, Connecticut. He and his wife, fellow writer and educator Denise Abercrombie, live in Storrs, Connecticut with their two sons, Kit and Miles.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Leigh Grossman/Fiction Reading
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center, 6:00 pm
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the UConn Bookstore.
Leigh Grossman is a writer, college lecturer, editor, and publishing consultant. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Connecticut and does typesetting, book development, and book production for various publishers and authors via his company, Swordsmith Productions. Grossman is the author of sixteen published books, most recently fantasy novel The Lost Daughters. He compiled and edited Sense of Wonder, the largest single-volume science fiction anthology ever produced. Previously, he was a production supervisor at Avon Books, an editor at Byron Preiss Visual Publications/Multimedia, a college-level history and writing instructor, and a reviewer for several genre magazines. He lives in northeast Connecticut with his wife and young daughter, where he serves as an elected member of two town boards.
Grossman’s writing credits include fantasy novels The Green Lion and The Golden Thorns; nonfiction works The Red Sox Fan Handbook, The Adult Student’s Guide, and The New England Museum Guide; along with several other books, and he was the original review editor for Horror magazine (where he primarily reviewed dark fantasy). He went on to write reviews for Wavelengths and Absolute Magnitude.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Aimee Nezhukumatathil/Writers Who Edit, Editors Who Write
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center 6:00 pm
Sponsored by the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and the Creative Writing Program.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born to a Filipino mother and Malayali Indian father, and is the author of four books of poetry: Oceanic (2018), Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), and Miracle Fruit (2003). Her collection of nature essays World of Wonder is forthcoming. With Ross Gay, she co-authored Lace & Pyrite (2014) a chapbook of nature poems. She serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine. In 2014, she became one of the country’s youngest poets to achieve the rank of full Professor of English. She is now professor of English and teaches environmental literature and poetry writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Claudia Rankine/The 56th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program
The Greater Hartford Classical Magnet School, 12:30 pm
Konover Auditorium, The Dodd Center, Storrs campus, 7:00 pm
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.
Claudia Rankine, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of five collections of poetry including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2008), and the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry. She teaches at Yale University as the Fredrick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Emily Rapp Black/Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction
UConn Bookstore, Storrs Center, 6:00 pm
Sponsored by the Aetna Chair of Writing.
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (2017) and The Still Point of the Turning World (2014), which was a New York Times bestseller, and Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN Center Literary Award in Nonfiction. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry. While at Harvard, she worked with the GLBT Speaker’s Foundation (SpeakOut), and organization that professionally trained speakers to tell their coming out stories in high schools, churches, and other public forums in an effort to increase awareness and understanding between the GLBT and straight communities.