MFA in Creative Writing | Winter 2024 Reading Series

New England College’s MFA in Creative Writing program hosts the 2024 Winter Reading Series, featuring readings by the program’s highly talented writers. The event is free and open to the public.

Dates: Tuesday, January 2–Friday, January 5, 2024
Time: 7:30 p.m. for all sessions
Location: John Lyons Learning Commons, 55 Depot Hill Road, for all sessions

Tuesday, January 2
Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Andrew Morgan

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of three books of poetry—In No One’s Land (Ahsahta, 2007); My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta, 2012); and Dolefully, A Rampart Stands (Penguin, 2019)—and other works of poetry and prose. Her poems have appeared in journals such as jubilat, Ninth Letter, Bellingham Review, Verse, and Copper Nickel. She’s received grants and fellowships from such places as Poets & Writers, Boomerang, Vermont Arts Council, and others.

Andrew Morgan is a professor, poet, editor, and volunteer whose work can be found in magazines such as Conduit, Verse, Slope, Stride, Fairy Tale Review, New World Writing, Post Road, Pleiades (as part of a “Younger American Poets” feature) and is the recipient of a Slovenian Writer’s Association Fellowship, which sponsored a month-long writing residency in the country’s capital city of Ljubljana. His first book, Month of Big Hands, was published by Natural History Press in 2013.

Wednesday, January 3
Allison Titus and Chika Unigwe

Allison Titus has written three books of poems, a novel, and several chapbooks. Her newest book is called HIGH LONESOME. Her honors include poetry fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, and the Donaldson Writer-in-Residence program at William & Mary, and her work has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, The Believer Magazine, and Ninth Letter, among other places. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE: Revisioning the Animal in 21st Century Poetry, a collection of writing slash manifesto that centers the nonhuman animal’s agency, consciousness and creaturehood.

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She was educated at UNN and KUL (Belgium) and earned her PhD from Leiden University, Holland. Widely translated, she has won many awards for her writing. Her books include The Middle Sister, On Black Sisters’ Street, and Better Never than Late. She is Creative Director of the Awele Creative Trust, and she was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. In 2016–2017, she was Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University.

Thursday, January 4
Tara Ison and Jennifer Militello

Tara Ison is the author of three novels: A Child out of Alcatraz, The List, and Rockaway; the essay collection Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies; and the short story collection Ball. Her work has appeared in Tin House; BOMB; The Kenyon Review; Salon; Black Clock; O, the Oprah Magazine; Electric Lit; and several anthologies. She is the recipient of multiple Yaddo fellowships, the PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction, and two NEA fellowships. She is also the co-writer of the cult classic movie Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ison is a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Jennifer Militello is the author of the poetry collection The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021) and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019) and is winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize. She is also the author of four previous collections of poetry, including A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), called “positively bewitching” by Publishers Weekly and Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the best books of 2013 by Best American Poetry. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and Tin House.

Friday, January 5
Chen Chen and David Ryan

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Bloodaxe Books has just released the UK edition. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently You MUST Use the Word Smoothie (Sundress Publications, 2019) and GESUNDHEIT! (with Sam Herschel Wein and out now from Glass Poetry Press). His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2019), and The Best American Nonrequired Reading (2017). He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence and co-runs the journal Underblong. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

David Ryan is the author of the short story collection, Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked (Ig Publishing). His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, BOMB, Fence, Denver Quarterly, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others, and has been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton), Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books), and The Mississippi Review: 30 Years. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, BOMB, BookForum, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Fiction (Oxford University Press), and others. A founding editor of the literary magazine, Post Road, he currently edits the Fiction and Theatre sections.