Readings by Award-Winning Writer, Alumni with New Books, and a Poetry Panel Coming Up
The UC Davis Creative Writing Program in the Department of English will present online readings March 2 and 3 — one by a star of the literary world, and another by three UC Davis alumni with newly published books. In April, three lyric and narrative poets who create long-form works will take part in a conversation and give readings. All the readings are co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library.
Alumni share new novels
Three graduates of the Creative Writing Program will return to campus virtually March 2 at 4:30 p.m. to read from their books published last year.
Megan Kaminski (M.A., English, ’05) is author of three poetry collections, the most recent titled Gentlewomen. An essayist as well as a poet, her writing has been published in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic and other publications.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi (M.A., English, ’11) is author of the novels The Book of Kane and Margaret, published in 2020, and Disintegration Made Plain and Easy. He also is a widely published poet.
Becky Mandelbaum (M.A., English, ’16) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the High Plains Book Award for First Book for her story collection Bad Kansas. Her new book is The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals. Her work has appeared in One Story, The Sun, Prairie Schooner and other publications.
Register for the alumni readings here.
National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado reads
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House traces the arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman and Machado’s struggle to make sense of how what happened shaped her. She will read March 3 at 4:30 p.m.
Machado is winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award.
Creative writing Master of Fine Arts students Anna Tuchin and Brianna Cockett-Mamiya will also read.
The reading is co-sponsored by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Register for the readings by Carmen Maria Machado and M.F.A. students here.
Three poets in conversation
Poets Jessica Laser, Margaret Ross and Noah Warren, whose work makes equal use of music and story, will have an online conversation April 8 at 3 p.m. with poet Katie Peterson, director of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, and a Q&A session with audience members. The three will give a reading at 4:30 p.m.
Laser has written two books of poems, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides and “Planet Drill,” being published this year. Her work has recently appeared online at the Poetry Foundation, in the Bennington Review, and in Aurochs. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a doctoral candidate in English at UC Berkeley.
Ross is the author of A Timeshare and her poems have recently appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poem-a-Day and The Yale Review. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is a Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Warren’s “The Complete Stories” will be published in May, and his The Destroyer in the Glass was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His poems have been published in The Paris Review, POETRY, The American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. He is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley.
Register for the conversation with three poets here.
Register for the readings by three poets here.