The Creative Writing program hosts an annual reading series featuring writers from across the country. Visitors conduct a Craft Talk for our undergraduate students in addition to giving a public reading.
Readings are free and open to the public.
While it always our goal to host these events in person, the actual delivery method is subject to the expected conditions at the time of the event. If converted, Zoom registration information will be posted as soon as possible.
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Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Event Location: Knight Library, Browsing Room.
Time: 04:30 PM
Thea Matthews (Poetry)
Thea Matthews is a poet, educator, and editor of African and Indigenous Mexican descent from San Francisco, California. She holds MFA in poetry from New York University and BA in sociology from UC Berkeley.
Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Common, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, Epiphany Magazine, Alta Journal, The new Republic, and others. Author and editor Nathan McClain says of Matthew's poetry, "Deploying familiar, if not found language often as refrain, "Matthews shows us ourselves, shows us our nation, and what it deems significant enough to value or keep."
In the fall of 2023, Matthews was a poet in residence for the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco and a curator for the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In June of 2020, she released Unearth [The Flowers] as a collaboration with Red Light Lit Press, and was listed by Kirkus Reviews as one of the top indie poetry collections of 2020. She Currently works for the Academy of American Poets and lives in Brooklyn, New York. For more information, visit Thea Matthews's website.
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Event Location: J Michaels Books (160 East Broadway, Eugene, Oregon)
Time: 7:00 PM
Jason Brown (Fiction)
Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer. He was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program.
He has published three books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House), Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic), and A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, published in the fall of 2019 as part of the short fiction series by Missouri Review Books.
His stories and essays have won several awards and appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, The L.A. Times, The Guardian, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, and other venues. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Jason’s third book of stories won the Maine Literary Prize for Fiction and an Independent Publisher Book Award.
In the fall of 2024 a novel called Outermark will be published by Paul Dry Books, and in 2025 a memoir called Character Witness will be published by the American Lives Series. He was the cowriter with Bill Guttentag of a feature film called Rule Breakers: The Story of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, which will be released in theaters across the country in the spring of 2025 and later on Amazon Prime.
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
Event Location: Knight Library, Browsing Room.
Time: 04:30 PM
Peter Vertacnik (Poetry)
Peter Vertacnik is the author of The Nature of Things Fragile (Criterion Books, 2024), winner of the 2023 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in journals such as 32 Poems, Bas Lilies, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Poet Lore, and THINK, among others.
With Chase Dearinger, Vertacnik is the co-director of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize at Pittsburg State University. Currently he resides in northeast Florida where he teaches at Episcopal School of Jacksonville. For more information, visit Peter Vertacnik website.
March 19, 2025
Event Location: Knight Library Browsing room
Time: 4:30 pm
Karen Thompson Walker (Fiction)
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Event Location: Gerlinger Lounge.
Time: 07:00 PM
Henri Cole (Poetry)
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College. For more information, visit Henri Cole website.
Photo Credit: Susan Unterberg
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Event Location: Knight Library Browsing Room
Time: 07:00 PM
Tania James (Fiction)