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 2023 and spring 2024 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 21, 2023
Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.
Mira Jacob
Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. It is currently in development as a television series with Film 44. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions.
October 6, 2023
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh's first novel.
Franny Choi
Franny Choi is a queer, Korean American writer of poems, essays, and more. Her most recent book is The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (HarperCollins, 2022), an NPR 2022 Books We Love and Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist. Her other books are Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick that Lit Hub praised as “a profoundly intelligent work which makes you feel.'' It was a Nylon Best Book of 2019, was awarded the Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2020, and was a finalist for awards from Lambda Literary, Publishing Triangle, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
November 2, 2023 Writer's Harvest
7:30pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Ramona Ausubel
Ramona Ausubel’s fifth book, The Last Animal, a novel, was published in the spring of 2023. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere.
Dan Beachy-Quick
Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick was born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and upstate New York. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa. Beachy-Quick's poetry collections include North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle's Apprentice (2011); Of Silence and Song (2017); and Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019). He is also the author of A Whaler's Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
Matthew Cooperman
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently NOS, disorder not otherwise specified (with Aby Kaupang, Futurepoem, 2018) and Spool (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), winner of the New Measure Prize. Other works include the image + text collaboration Imago for the Fallen World (w/Marius Lehene, Jaded Ibis, 2013), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE, (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. He’s also the author of five chapbooks: Disorder 299.00 (w/ Aby Kaupang, Essay Press, 2016), Little Spool (winner of the 2014 Pavement Saw Prize), Still: (to be) Perpetual (Dove | Tail, 2007), Words About James (Phylum Press, 2005), and Surge (Kent State University Press, 1998).
Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2, 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
November 9, 2023
7:30pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom (new location!)
Adrian Lürssen
Born and raised in Apartheid-era South Africa and then Washington, DC, Adrian Lürssen now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Fence, Posit, the Boston Review, Phoebe, American Letters & Commentary, Witness, 580 Split, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Neowise, from Trainwreck Press.
Leonora Simonovis
Leonora Simonovis is a bilingual poet who grew up near Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives in San Diego, California, where she teaches Latin American literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego. She is a VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) fellow, has an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and is a contributing editor for Drizzle Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Gargoyle Magazine, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Arkansas International, Inverted Syntax, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.
February 29, 2024
7:30pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
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 The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), Inquisition (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) All One’s Blue (HarperCollins India, 2016) Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008); The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005) winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and Wind Instrument (Spork Press, 2014). His most recent book is Northern Light: Power, Land and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021).
Vauhini Vara
Vauhini Vara is a Canadian-born American journalist, fiction writer, and the former business editor of The New Yorker. She lives in Colorado and is a contributing writer for The New Yorker website. Her highly acclaimed first novel The Immortal King Rao was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her story collection This is Salvaged was published in September 2023.
March 7, 2024
Mary Crow Alumni Reading
7:30pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Samantha Tucker
Samantha Tucker is an anti-racist teacher, writer, and editor. She writes personal essays, memoir, and cultural critique. Her essay “Fountain Girls,” originally published in Ecotone, is a listed notable in Best American Essays 2017, and is anthologized in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology.
Kristin George Bagdanov
Kristin George Bagdanov is a poet, scholar, and environmental advocate. She received her PhD from UC Davis and her MFA from Colorado State University. She has two poetry collections—Fossils in the Making (Black Ocean) and Diurne (Tupelo Press)—and several poetry zines. She lives in Sacramento, CA and works for a non-profit organization that advocates for fossil-fuel-free buildings. More at kristingeorgebagdanov.com.
April 4, 2024
7:30 pm
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Gale Marie Thompson
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Mountain Amnesia, winner of the 2023 Colorado Prize in Poetry, Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020) and Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015). Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, and Mississippi Review, among others. A winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2022 Emily Dickinson Award, Thompson has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and currently works as an editor in book development for YesYes Books. Gale lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.
Hermione Hoby
Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight, a two-time New York Times editors’ choice, and Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. She writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review, and her criticism and essays have also appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband Benjamin Kunkel.
THESIS READINGS
7:00pm
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 7, 2023
Anna Emerson, Julia Marquez-Uppman, Grant Helzer
Join in-person or via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/99154980545
February 1, 2024
Nicole Piasecki, Carolina Bucheli Peñafiel, Bianca Melendrez Valenzuela
Join in-person or via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/96957212706
March 21, 2024
Ben Freedman, River Grabowski, Laura Roth
April 25, 2024
Lauren Furman, Tashiana Seebeck, Nicole Pagliari
