Welcome to the Creative Writing Reading Series
Each semester at Colorado State University, the Creative Writing Reading Series welcomes distinguished literary voices to share their work and engage with the Northern Colorado community. In addition to giving a public reading, visiting writers hold audience question-and-answer sessions, book signings, class visits, salons, and other forms of outreach.
The series features Pulitzer Prize winners, U.S. poets laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award winners, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winners, NAACP Image Award nominees, Oprah’s Book Club selections, National Book Award finalists, and recognized voices in young adult literature.
All events are free of charge and open to the public. Explore the 2025-2026 lineup below!
The CSU Creative Writing Reading Series is made possible by the Organization of Graduate Student Writers, the CSU Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, CSU Libraries, the Mary Crow and Deanna Ludwin Reading Series Endowment, the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, the donor sponsor of the Crow-Tremblay Alumni Reading Series, and other generous support. Learn how to become a donor and support the series here.
September 18, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Elizabeth Jacobson
Elizabeth Jacobson’s third full-length collection, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, is from FVE/Parlor Press, 2025. Her previous collection, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) won the New Measure Poetry Prize, and the 2019 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Jacobson was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, NM and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches for and directs the poetry programs at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts and is a reviews editor for Terrain.org.
Erika Krouse
Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her new short story collection, Save Me, Stranger. Her memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Colorado Book Award and Housatonic Book Award. Erika is a two-time winner of the Edgar Award, for Fact Crime and Short Story. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Erika mentors for the Book Project and the Portfolio Year at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she received the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.
October 9, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center Theatre
Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and award-winning writer, a master storyteller who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. In all of his work, Luis encourages empathy and compassion for our shared humanity.
The author of 17 books, he has published extensively in various genres and has received many prestigious awards. The Devil’s Highway, his non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was called, “the single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy” by The Atlantic. His highly acclaimed historical novels; The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America together tell the epic story of Teresita Urrea, a great aunt who was a healer and Mexican folk hero. Luis is also the author of Into the Beautiful North, The House of Broken Angels, and his latest, Good Night, Irene, which takes as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
Throughout his career, Luis has established himself as a passionate and prolific voice urging readers to break down borders instead of putting up walls.
Mariah Rigg
Mariah Rigg is the author of the short story collection Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, 2025). Her chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle was published by Bull City Press in 2023. Mariah’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Lambda Literary, along with being published by The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, The Common, Joyland, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Writers Harvest
November 6, 2025
Each year, the Creative Writing program participates in a nationwide program to fight hunger. Across the country, writers and readers unite to support food banks, soup kitchens, and local nutrition programs.
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Dan Beachy-Quick
Poet, essayist, and translator Dan Beachy-Quick has published numerous poetry collections since 2003. He is also the author of A Whaler's Dictionary, a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Recent publications include How to Draw a Circle: On Reading & Writing (Michigan UP’s Poets on Poetry Series) and a translation of Sappho and Pre-Socratic philosophy.
Matthew Cooperman
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2024) and Wonder About The, winner of the Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek, 2023) as well as NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), and other books. His ninth book, Time, & Its Monument, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press. A Founding Editor of Quarter After Eight, Cooperman is Co-Poetry Editor for Colorado Review, and Professor of English at Colorado State University. More information is available on his website.
Devon Fulford
Devon Fulford (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections onus (2025), gulp (2024), the skin song (2024), and southern atheist: oh, honey (2021). She serves as the faculty director for Literacy Through Prose and Poetry at Colorado State University, where she teaches undergraduate writing and literature courses. Devon holds a Doctor of Education in transformative leadership and is in the first year of a PhD in creative writing, in which she is composing a craft book about the benefits of using experiential learning in the writing classroom.
February 19, 2026
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Hoa Nguyen
Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her books include Red Juice, the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a finalist for the National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award. She’s the 2024 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, an Aquarius, and a Fire Horse.
Dale Martin Smith
Dale Martin Smith is a poet and literary scholar at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of many poetry collections, most recently The Size of Paradise and Flying Red Horse. Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 and several edited editions, including An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making. His writing has appeared in Poetry, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lana Turner. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, from 1998-2004. In 2025, he was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Crow-Tremblay Alumni Reading
March 12, 2026
An anonymous donor funds this annual event to celebrate the achievements of graduates of CSU's Creative Writing MFA program. Past readers include Claire Boyles, Steven Church, Jennifer Dick, Kristin George Bagdanov, Justin Hocking, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wendy Rawlings, Molly Reid, and Felicia Zamora.
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Robin Walter
Robin Walter (she/her/hers) was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She received a BA from Colorado College and an MFA from Colorado State University. Walter is the author of Little Mercy (Graywolf Press, 2025), which was selected by Victoria Chang as the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Her poetry and essays have been featured in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Seneca Review, West Branch, Wildness, and elsewhere.
Mia Heavener
Mia Heavener is of Norwegian, Polish, and Yup’ik heritage. Her novel, Under Nushagak Bluff, is a powerful mid-century tale of women, love, loss, resilience. During the summers, she commercial fishes with her family in Bristol Bay. She believes that everyone should have a good whiff of the tundra at least once in their life, if not twice. She has an MFA from Colorado State University. Her fiction has appeared in Cortland Review and Willow Springs.
March 26, 2026
7:30pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta is the author of five novels, most recently Wayward (Knopf). She has been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, a Creative Capital Award, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program.
Mark Sundeen
Mark Sundeen is the author of Delusions + Grandeur, The Unsettlers, The Man Who Quit Money, The Making of Toro, and Car Camping. His work has been translated into eight languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in the New York Times, The Believer, National Geographic Adventure, McSweeneys, and Best American Essays. He has won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and fellowships from Macdowell Colony, Montello Foundation, Montana Arts Council and Utah Arts Council. A former river guide and Outward Bound instructor, he is an associate professor of environmental writing at the University of Montana.
Center for Literary Publishing Reading
April 16, 2026
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Asha Futterman
Asha Futterman is a poet and actor from Chicago. Her chapbook empathy was published by The Song Cave in 2024. Her poems appear in Poetry, Bennington Review, and Conduit. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and teaches at an elementary school in Brooklyn.
Susan McCabe
Susan McCabe was born on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and in her mother’s country of Sweden. She received her PhD at UCLA, and is professor of creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Cinematic Modernism, and a bi-biography, An Untold Love Story: H.D. & Bryher (Oxford 2021). She has published three poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press), Descartes’ Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize, Utah University Press), and most recently, I Woke A Lake (2025), in the Mountain West Poetry series, published by The Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) at Colorado State University (CSU). She is currently working on Sister, My Sweet Fleet Sister, a memoir in verse.
MFA THESIS READINGS
Students in their final year of CSU's graduate program in creative writing give a public reading from their thesis or other major work in progress.
Please join us as we celebrate these promising writers!
All readings begin at 7 p.m.
November 13, 2025
Lory Student Center, Room 386
Erin Peters (poetry), Maia Coen (fiction), and Carolyn Silverstein (fiction)
January 29, 2026
Lory Student Center, Room 386
Caitlin Kahihikolo (creative nonfiction) and Will Hutchinson (fiction)
April 2, 2026
Lory Student Center, Room 386
Kaes Vanderspek (poetry), Navya Sharma (fiction), and Courtney Zenner (creative nonfiction)
April 30, 2026
The Center for Creativity, Library Park, 200 Mathews St.
Liz Ramirez (creative nonfiction), Natalia Sperry (poetry), Josephine Gawtry (poetry), and Sarah Mullens (creative nonfiction)
