MFA in Creative Writing | Summer 2024 Reading Series

New England College’s MFA in Creative Writing program hosts the 2024 Summer Reading Series, featuring readings by the program’s highly talented writers. The week culminates with a reading by Victoria Chang, the 2024 Elizabeth Yates McGreal Writer-in-Residence.

Dates: Friday, July 12–Friday, July 19, 2024
Time: 7:30 p.m. for all sessions
Locations: John Lyons Learning Commons, 55 Depot Hill Road, and the Rosamond Page Putnam Center for the Performing Arts, 10 Weare Road, in Henniker, NH
Admission: FREE and open to the public

Friday, July 12
John Lyons Learning Commons |
Chen Chen and Tara Ison

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.

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.

Saturday, July 13
Putnam Center for the Performing Arts | Andrew Morgan and David Ryan

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. Currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New England College, his first book, Month of Big Hands, was published by Natural History Press in 2013.

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.

Sunday, July 14
John Lyons Learning Commons |
Jennifer Militello and Chika Unigwe

Jennifer Militello is the author of the poetry collection The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021) and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019), 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.

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.

Monday, July 15
John Lyons Learning Commons |
Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Anna Qu

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of three collections of poetry—In No One’s Land (Ahsahta, 2007); My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta, 2012); Dolefully, A Rampart Stands (Penguin, 2019); and other works of poetry and prose. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals, and she’s received grants and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Boomerang, Vermont Arts Council, and others. Paige is especially interested in the prose poem and is currently at work on a collection concerned with middle age and the history of transportation. She lives in New York City and directs the MFA in Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Anna Qu is a Chinese-American writer. Her debut memoir, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor was published in 2021 by Catapult. Publisher’s Weekly hailed the memoir as “the arrival of a new voice,” and Time has called it a must-read for the summer. Her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches workshops at Catapult and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.

Tuesday, July 16–Thursday, July 18
John Lyons Learning Commons |
MFA Student Readings

Friday, July 19
Putnam Center for the Performing Arts |
Victoria Chang, the 2024 Elizabeth Yates McGreal Writer-in-Residence

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). Her prior book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. Her book of poems, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.