Join Noah Hawley—novelist, screenwriter, and director—and Bret Anthony Johnson, director of the Michener Center for Writers, on Wednesday, November 12th from 6-8pm at the Harry Ransom Center for a screening of the pilot episode of Alien: Earth (released August 2025 on FX). The pilot highlights Hawley’s singular storytelling—his ability to craft complex characters, weave resonant themes, and reimagine iconic franchises with originality and depth. Hawley, recently awarded the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat Summer Residency, will discuss the craft and vision behind the series as part of this special event. A reception will follow the program.

Join us on October 9th from 6-8pm at the Harry Ransom Center for a poetry reading with Sandra Lim. Sandra Lim’s previous collections of poetry include The Wilderness (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press). She is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Levis Reading Prize. Her writing has appeared in a range of journals, including The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Baffler, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Chang was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon Press). Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature.