Visiting Writers Series

Lysley Tenorio will read and discuss his work. He is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune and the story collection Monstress, which was named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a NEA fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, the Edmund White Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

Jean Chen Ho will read and discuss her work. She is the author of the novel Fiona and Jane. Her writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Times, Georgia Review, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is the 2023 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College and a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USC.

Jenny Johnson will read and discuss her work. She is the author of the poetry collection In Full Velvet. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. will read and discuss his work. He is Professor and Chair of Indigenous Nations Studies and Director of the School of Gender Race and Nations at Portland State University. His mosaic novel about sort-of growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes, winner of the 2019 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing, is now in its second printing. His next work, Sacred City, was published in 2021, also by the University of New Mexico Press, who released his edited volume, The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones.

Aaron Philip Clark (’08 MFA Writing) will read and discuss his work. Clark is a native of Los Angeles.

Fernando A. Flores will read and discuss his work. Born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, Flores grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the short story collections Valleyesque and Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com.

Nicky Beer will read and discuss her work. She is the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. She is a bi/queer writer, and the author of two other collections of poems, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both winners of the Colorado Book Award.

Myriam Gurba will read and discuss her work. Gurba is a writer and artist from Santa Maria, California. She is the author of the memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice, and the story collections Painting Their Portraits in Winter and Dahlia Season, winner of the Edmund White Award. Gurba is also the author of the poetry collections, Wish You Were Here and Sweatsuits of the Damned. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, TIME.com, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Dexter L. Booth will read and discuss his work. He is the author of the poetry collections Abracadabra, Sunshine, and Scratching the Ghost, which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Rhapsody. His poems have been included in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2015, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Booth holds a Ph.D.

Eduardo C. Corral will read and discuss his work. His second collection of poetry, Guillotine, was awarded the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. His debut collection, Slow Lightening, won the Yale Younger Series Poets Award, making him the first Latinx recipient of this prize.