MFA in Creative Writing | Winter 2025 Reading Series

New England College’s MFA in Creative Writing program hosts the 2025 Winter Reading Series, featuring readings by the program’s highly talented writers. This event is free and open to the public.

Dates: Tuesday, January 7–Friday, January 10, 2025
Time: 7:30 p.m. for all sessions
Location: John Lyons Learning Commons, 55 Depot Hill Road, for all sessions

Tuesday, January 7

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.

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/manifesto that centers the nonhuman animal’s agency, consciousness, and creaturehood.

Wednesday, January 8

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). Chen’s debut essay collection, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God is forthcoming from Noemi Press. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The New York Times. His writing is also widely anthologized, including in 100 Poems That Matter, 100 Queer Poems, three editions of The Best American Poetry, and two editions of The Forward Book of Poetry. His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018–2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and has taught for the Stonecoast MFA program, the Antioch MFA program, and the UMass Boston MFA program. He is also recurring faculty at the Fine Arts Work Center. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the MFA program at New England College.

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.

Thursday, January 9

Visiting Writer Chard deNiord is the author of One As Another and five more books of poetry, as well as two books of interviews with eminent American poets. He has co-founded a number of writing programs, the NEC MFA program. He was named Poet Laureate of Vermont in 2015.

Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and nomad currently based out of San Diego, California. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and short fiction publications in Fireside Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and more. He is the author of the young adult Fantasy novel DAUGHTERS OF ODUMA and the fantasy novellas THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO and THE TRUTH OF THE ALEKE. When he’s not writing, he’s traveling, training martial arts, or doing karaoke—with or without a backing track.

Friday, January 10

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), called “emotionally resonant” by Publishers Weekly and “an incantatory homage to love” by the Times Literary Supplement, and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019), winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, as well as four previous collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry.

David Ryan is the author of Animals in Motion: Stories (Roundabout Press) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His fiction appears in the 2022 and 2023 O. Henry Prize anthologies, The 2023 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize (Spain/UK), Threepenny Review, Fiction, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Journal, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Letters, Esquire, Tin House, BOMB, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton), Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic), and The Mississippi Review: 30 Years. His nonfiction appears in The Paris Review, Tin House, BOMB, Bookforum, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Fiction (Oxford University Press), and others. A recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and Connecticut State Arts grants, he’s a co-founding editor of Post Road Magazine, where he currently edits the Fiction and Theatre sections.