Category: Events

Event: Spring Faculty Reading: Jennifer Foerster & Manuel Muñoz on January 18th, 6pm

The Michener Center’s Spring 2024 Visiting Faculty members Jennifer Foerster and Manuel Muñoz will read their work at the Harry Ransom Center Prothro Theatre at 6pm on Thursday, January 18th, 2024. The reading is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow.


Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe-Bird, and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the Literary Assistant to the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.

 

Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and two selections in Best American Short Stories, and was awarded the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. His most recent collection, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press and in the UK by The Indigo Press in October 2022.  It was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize.  It will be published in Italian by Edizioni Black Coffee and in Turkish by Livera Yayinevi. In October 2023, he was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American communities of California’s Central Valley.” His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Epoch, and Glimmer Train.  His most recent work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, and a first-generation college student, Manuel graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Event: Reading with Carolyn Forché on November 2nd, 6pm

Poet Carolyn Forché will read her work at the Harry Ransom Center, with a reception to follow.

Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Her first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World.

She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.

“Carolyn Forché shows how people survive in an unbearable world.” —Daina Savage

Reserve your seat here.

Event: Reading with Ayad Akhtar on September 26th, 6pm

Author, playwright, and President of PEN America, Ayad Akhtar, will read his latest work, followed by a book signing and reception at the Harry Ransom Center. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What(Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).

Reserve your seat here.

MCW Graduation Readings in May!

The Michener Center is thrilled to celebrate our classes of 2020, 2021, and 2022 this May! Please join us for three public readings (5/7, 5/13, and 5/14) at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC). Details for each reading below.

 

 

Reading for the Class of 2022
May 7, 2022

Place: The Harry Ransom Center (HRC)
Time: Reception at 5pm, Reading at 6pm
Readings by: Chichi Abii, Emmie Atwood, Beverly Chukwu, Kendra Daniels, Rickey Fayne, Ryan Paradiso, Mary Lee, Alejandro Puyana, Jaymes Sanchez, Zack Schlosberg, Leela Srinivasan, & Molly Williams.

Reading for the Class of 2020
May 13, 2022
Place:
The Harry Ransom Center (HRC)
Time: Reception at 5pm, Reading at 6pm
Readings by: Desiree Evans, Shangyang Fang, Annelyse Gelman, Nathan Harris, Rachel Heng, Michael Herr, Paul Kruse, Cecelia Raker, Tracey Rose, Daniel Ruiz, Kim Tran, & Minghao Tu.

Reading for the Class of 2021
May 14, 2022
Place:
The Harry Ransom Center (HRC)
Time: Reception at 5pm, Reading at 6pm
Readings by: Amanda Bestor-Siegal, Maryan Captan, Hedgie Choi, Willie Fitzgerald, Lauren Green, David Grivette, Jackson Holbert, Gursimrat Kaur, Bismarck Martinez, Sam Mayer, Soeun Seo, & Avigayl Sharp.

 

Event: Paul Yoon in Conversation with Laura van den Berg

You are invited to an evening with acclaimed novelist and short story writer Paul Yoon at BookPeople on Thursday, February 20 at 7PM. He is the author of numerous books including, Once the Shore, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Debut of the Year by National Public Radio, the novel Snow Hunters, which won the 2014 Young Lions Fiction Award, and The Mountain, which was a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year. His latest novel is Run Me to Earth, reviewed here in the New York Times. You may have seen Paul’s appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers last week. Paul will be in conversation with Laura van den Berg. This event is free and open to the public. Let us know you’re coming on Facebook

Poetry Reading: Tracy K. Smith

7PM
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Harry Ransom Center
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Join us for an evening with Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Life on Mars. Her memoir Ordinary Light was shortlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. A Q&A and reception will follow the reading.

Sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers and the Harry Ransom Center.

This reading is free and open to the public.

Event: An Evening with Lauren Groff

6PM
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Harry Ransom Center
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We are thrilled to have Lauren Groff for a reading at the Ransom Center on October 10th. She is the author of numerous books including Fates and Furies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and was a New York Times Bestseller. It was President Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015. Groff is also the author of the recent and acclaimed short story collection Florida. 

“Lauren Groff is a great storyteller . . . Florida is restorative fiction for these urgent times. Its final gestures, even the most ominous . . . lean toward love and the promise of good people, in not just this state but the world.” –New York Times

Sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers and the Harry Ransom Center.

This reading is free and open to the public.

 

Reading: Joanna Klink

6PM
Tuesday, September 24
Mulva Auditorium
Engineering and Education Research Center (EER)
2501 Speedway
Facebook Event

Joanna Klink is the author of They Are Sleeping (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Circadian (Penguin Books, 2007), Raptus (Penguin Books, 2010), and Excerpts for a Secret Prophecy (Penguin Books, 2015). She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, The Bogliasco Foundation, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana.

Joanna Klink is the Fall 2019 Visiting Poet at the Michener Center for Writers. This event is free and open to the public.

Directions to the Mulva Auditorium: