The Creative Writing Reading Series
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 2026-2027 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 10, 2026
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine’s most recent book is the novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press, 2025), winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. His other novels are The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Atlantic, 2021), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016); An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the California Book Award, and a Washington Post, Kirkus, and NPR Best Book of 2014; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); and Koolaids (Picador, 1998). He is also the author of a book of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999) and the nonfiction work Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art (University of Virginia Press, 2024), which Publishers Weekly called “essential reading” in a starred review. Alameddine received the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025.
Born in Amman, Jordan, Alameddine grew up in Lebanon and Kuwait, lived in England, and then moved to the United States. He earned a degree in engineering from UCLA and an MBA in San Francisco before becoming a painter and novelist.
H.L. Hix
H. L. Hix earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas, taught for fifteen years at Kansas City Art Institute, and currently holds a joint appointment in the Philosophy Department and the Creative Writing Program at a state university in the Mountain West. His more than forty books include poetry collections such as Constellation and Bored in Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark; collaborative translations of contemporary Estonian and Lithuanian poetry, such as Terribly in Love by Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė; essay collections and hybrid works such as Say It Into My Mouth; a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; and anthologies such as the NEA-commissioned New Voices. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and held a Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship at Yonsei University in Seoul. He lives with his partner, the poet Kate Northrop, and writes each morning in a converted barn to the sound of mice in its walls and raccoons trundling across its roof.
October 8, 2026
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, Longs Peak Room
Anna Qu
Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, and Kweli Journal, among others. She is a 2023 Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow and has received support from Yaddo and Ragdale. She teaches at New England College and Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s The Book Project, and lives in Denver.
Rajiv Mohabir
Poet, memoirist, and translator Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry; the latest is Seabeast (Four Way Books, 2025). His books have been awarded Gold in the Foreword Indies and the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Award for Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle Award for Gay Nonfiction, as well as both a second-place finish and finalist recognition for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently, he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Writers Harvest
November 5, 2026
7:00 p.m.
Lory Student Center, Never No Summer Ballroom
Mary Crow
Former Poet Laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow has published three full-length collections of poems, three chapbooks, and five books of translation. Her most recent book of poems is Addicted to the Horizon. Her awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado Council on the Arts, as well as three Fulbright awards. Her residencies include MacDowell, Djerassi, and Hedgebrook in the U.S., and El Gouna, Valparaiso, and Cesky Krumlov abroad. She is currently circulating a new poetry manuscript, Toward What Country.
Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the author of the novels Therapy, A Good Doctor’s Son, and The Tenderest of Strings, as well as four collections of stories. A two-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction, he has received the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University and fiction editor at large for Colorado Review.
Deanna Kern Ludwin
Deanna Kern Ludwin taught literature and creative writing at Colorado State University, where she also coordinated the English Department Internship Program and the Creative Writing Teaching Program. While at CSU, she received a College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award, a University Best Teacher Award, and two Golden Apple Awards. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Flash, Gyroscope, I-70 Review, The Normal School, Second Coming, and other publications. She is currently working on a poetry collection and an investigative memoir, The Girl Who Died.
Bill Tremblay
Bill Tremblay has published Magician’s Hat: Poems on the Life and Art of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Walks Along the Ditch, The Luminous Racetrack, and My Triggering Town since retiring from the faculty of Colorado State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing in 2006. During his time in the English Department, he initiated several courses, including internships in teaching creative writing and literary editing. He has also kept himself busy writing a series of reviews of books by contemporary American poets for Rain Taxi. He is currently preparing his latest book for publication.
John Calderazzo
John Calderazzo was a freelance magazine writer when he came to CSU in 1986, where he started the undergraduate creative nonfiction program and taught an expanded range of graduate CNF courses. Later, with Debby Thompson and Sarah Sloane, he founded the MFA nonfiction track. John’s three nonfiction books include Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives, about volcanoes and human culture. He’s also the author of two poetry collections, The Exact Weight of the Soul and In the Soup. His work has appeared in Audubon, Georgia Review, High Country News, North American Review, Orion, Terrain.org, Witness, Writer’s Digest, and many other journals, as well as in anthologies such as Best American Nature Writing, Best Travel Adventure Stories, and Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press). He’s the winner of the Carolina Quarterly Young Fiction Writers’ Prize, a Colorado Arts Council grant, Best CSU Teacher, and many other teaching awards. With his wife and CSU colleague SueEllen Campbell, he initiated what may have been the country’s first campus-wide climate change discussion and speaker series. Since retiring in 2016, he has taught storytelling techniques to scientists who want to speak to the public and decision-makers.
February 11, 2027
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Joanna Howard
Joanna Howard is the author of the novel Porthole (McSweeney’s, 2025) and the memoir Rerun Era (McSweeney’s, 2019). Other works include Foreign Correspondent (Counterpath, 2013), On the Winding Stair (BOA Editions, 2009), and In the Colorless Round, a prose collaboration with artist Rikki Ducornet (Noemi, 2006). She co-wrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco (Sidebrow, 2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, BOMB, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver and Providence, RI, and teaches at the University of Denver.
Nic Brown
Nic Brown is a writer and a musician. His books include Violent Femmes’ Violent Femmes (33 1/3, Bloomsbury, 2026), the memoir Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint, 2023), which was named a book of the year by Library Journal and Booklist, and the novels In Every Way (Counterpoint, 2015), Doubles (Counterpoint, 2010), and Floodmarkers (Counterpoint, 2009), which was selected as an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, and Harvard Review, among many other publications.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University, Nic has served as the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and is now a professor at Clemson University.
He is also a drummer. With his first band, Athenaeum, he released two records on Atlantic Records. The first single from their debut album peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Alternative Rock chart. He has since recorded and toured with many acts, including Longwave, Ben Lee, Skeleton Key, and Kim Richey.
Crow-Tremblay Alumni Reading
March 4, 2027
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Katie Naughton
Katie Naughton is a 2016 graduate of the CSU MFA program and the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press, 2024) and three chapbooks, most recently Debt Ritual (Fonograf Editions/Bunny Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Her research has received fellowship support from the Canada–US Fulbright Program and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Marc Dickinson
Marc Dickinson is the author of the short story collection Replacement Parts (Atmosphere Press, 2024). His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, North American Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, South Dakota Review, and American Literary Review (as winner of the ALR Fiction Prize), as well as other journals. He received an MFA from Colorado State University and now lives in Iowa with his wife and two children, where he teaches creative writing at Des Moines Area Community College and coordinates the long-running reading series Celebration of the Literary Arts.
Center for Literary Publishing Reading
April 7, 2027
7:30 p.m.
Lory Student Center, University Ballroom
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang is a poet, editor, writer, and author of eight books of poems, a memoir, and three books for young readers. Her newest book of poems is Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, was published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair Books in the U.K. and received the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry. She is a Professor of English at Georgia Tech and serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry and the Director of Poetry@Tech.
Reed Turchi
Reed Turchi is a poet and musician from Swannanoa, North Carolina, now living in Brooklyn. His debut manuscript, Dancing with Poets, was selected by Victoria Chang for the 2026 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, and Narrative, among others. A self-taught slide guitarist and recording engineer, Turchi has won a Grammy Award, received an Emmy nomination, and been featured in Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, No Depression, Oxford American, and more. Turchi earned his MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, where he was awarded the Ellen Bryant Voigt Scholarship, and he has received support and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He co-edits The Swannanoa Review with his wife, the poet Kate Welsh.
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.
December 3, 2026
Lory Student Center, Room 390
Readers TBA
January 28, 2027
Lory Student Center, Room 386
Readers TBA
April 1, 2027
Lory Student Center, Room 386
Readers TBA
April 29, 2027
Location TBA
Readers TBA