Welcome to the Creative Writing Reading Series
Each fall and spring semester at Colorado State University, the Department of English welcomes distinguished literary voices to share their work and to engage with the local community. Visiting writers hold audience question-and-answer sessions, book signings, other outreach activities, and salons. Salons are informal gatherings with visiting authors; they will often bring a writing exercise and there will always be time to ask questions about their practice, publication experience, and anything else on your mind.
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.
Read more about our special-guest writers for fall 2024 and spring 2025 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 Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, the donor sponsor of the Crow-Tremblay Alumni Reading Series and other generous support. Learn about how you can support the series online here.
September 19, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Meredith Talusan
Meredith Talusan received a Creative Capital Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for fiction in 2023; her stories appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Epoch, The Rumpus, Grand, Catapult, and BLR. Her debut memoir, Fairest, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a best book of the year by multiple venues. She has contributed to ten other books and written articles for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and WIRED, among many outlets. She has received journalism awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding executive editor and current contributing editor at them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ digital platform.
Paul Yoon
Paul Yoon's most recent book is The Hive and the Honey (Simon & Schuster, 2023), a finalist for The Story Prize, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and a Time Top Ten Fiction Book of 2023. His other books include Run Me to Earth (Simon & Schuster, 2020), longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; The Mountain (Simon & Schuster, 2017), named a best book of the year by NPR, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal; Snow Hunters (Simon & Schuster, 2013), winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award in 2014; and Once the Shore (Sarabande Books, 2009), winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Best American Short Stories. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York, with his wife and dog.
October 17, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Brent Ameneyro
Brent Ameneyro is the author of A Face Out of Clay (Mountain/West Poetry Series) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). His poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from San Diego State University, where he was awarded the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. A 2022–23 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, he currently serves as the poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.
Jennifer Soong
Jennifer Soong is the author of several works of poetry, including My Earliest Person (forthcoming with The Last Books), Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024), and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, 2022). Her critical monograph Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. Her essays have appeared or are due to appear in Critical Inquiry, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, Post45, and Chicago Review. Originally from New Jersey, she lives and works as an assistant professor in Denver.
November 7, 2024 Writer's Harvest
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Andrew Altschul
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels The Gringa, Deus Ex Machina, and Lady Lazarus. His stories and essays have appeared in publications including Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, One Story, FENCE, and anthologies including Best New American Voices and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA since 2012, this is his tenth year teaching at CSU.
Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry (she/they) is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Perry has received a 2020-2022 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, and fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, VCCA, Playa, and The Studios of Key West. She holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Colorado State University. Her second book, Sweet Nothings, a collection of 100 flash essays exploring candy as a vehicle of joy, resilience, and memory, is forthcoming from Mariner in February 2025.
Sasha Steensen
Sasha Steensen is the author of six books of poetry: A Magic Book; The Method; House of Deer (all from Fence Books); Gatherest (Ahsahta Press); Everything Awake (Shearsman Press); and Well (Parlor Press). She also writes long-form essays, two of which can be read online at Essay Press (http://www.essaypress.org/ep-40/) and Tupelo Quarterly https://www.tupeloquarterly.com. She is currently at work on a hybrid project, Overland: An Incomplete History of Three Acres and all That Surrounds (https://www.sashasteensen.com/overland) that documents the seizure, and subsequent development, of hundreds of acres of Native American Land in Northern Colorado. She teaches undergraduate and graduate Literature and Creative Writing classes at Colorado State University, where she was named the 2023 Stern Distinguished Professor. Steensen serves on the advisory board for the Test Site Poetry Series, and as a poetry editor for Colorado Review.
February 20, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg’s most recent book is I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020), named one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. Her other books include the novels The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and Find Me (FSG, 2015), and two story collections, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009). Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, among many other honors. Born and raised in Florida, Laura lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar.
Laura Pritchett
Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels, two nonfiction books, and editor of three environmental-based anthologies. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Born in Fort Collins, two of her degrees are from CSU, and she’s delighted to call this area home. When not writing or teaching, she’s generally found exploring the mountains.
March 6, 2025
Mary Crow Alumni Reading
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Molly Reid
Molly Reid’s collection of short fiction, The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary (BOA 2019) was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in the journals Ninth Letter, West Branch, TriQuarterly, Witness, and others. Molly received her MFA in fiction from Colorado State University, her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Kylan Rice
Kylan Rice, PhD, is the author of An Image Not a Book (Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2023), a collection of poems, and Incryptions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), a collection of essays. His creative writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Image, Oxford Poetry, Seneca Review, West Branch, and other journals. He is the associate editor of the Missouri Review and co-editor of Thirdhand Books.
April 10, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Nicholas Gulig
Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin and the 2023–24 Wisconsin Poet Laureate. A 2011 Fulbright Fellow, he is the author of The Other Altar, winner of the 2024 Colorado Prize for Poetry; North of Order (YesYes Books); and Orient (CSU Poetry Center). He is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he co-edits Either/Or magazine, and lives in Fort Atkinson with his wife and two daughters.
Tishani Doshi
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, fiction and essays. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, India, performing on stages all across the world, and as such, the body has been a central preoccupation in her work—a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation. Since her debut, Countries of the Body, which won the Forward Prize for best first collection (2006), she has sought to find joineries between the lyric and the political. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017) headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award. Her novels, The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Small Days and Nights (2019), have been shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. A God at the Door, her most recent collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
THESIS READINGS
7:00 p.m.
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Hoffert Learning Center
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.
December 5, 2024
Ainhoa Palacios (fiction), Jake Friedman (poetry), and Becca Tabb (creative nonfiction)
February 6, 2025
Dottie Angle (fiction) and Henry Dykstal (fiction)
April 24, 2025
Chase Cate (poetry), Amy Gordon (creative nonfiction), Linnea Harris (creative nonfiction)
