The Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, invites you to a Virtual Open House. Classes are small, mostly in the evening, and students work closely with faculty mentors. Use the QR code to register and learn more.
10 River Terrace New York, NY 10282 | Tuesday| October 29 | 7-9pm
In honor of our own Distinguished Professor Kimiko Hahn’s achievement as a poet, curator, and professor, Poet’s House will be holding a tribute reading at the end of the month featuring Tamiko Beyer, Mark Doty, and Roger Sedarat, and of course Kimiko Hahn herself.
Ever the innovator, Hahn’s latest book, The Ghost Forest (W.W. Norton, 2024), is not just a book of selected poems after a long and illustrious career, but a conversation–the book opens with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes. This exchange between old and new work, between tradition and identity, transforms this book into a hybrid autobiography.
Hahn will read from the new poems in the collection, while guest poets will read selections of their favorite works by Hahn throughout the decades.
The reading will take place in Poets House’s Kray Hall, with a reception to follow.
As fans of poetry, we hope to see you there!
It’s been a good week for alums–yesterday we announced that MFA alum Liv Mammone’s first poetry collection will come out next year with Game Over Books next August, today we can tell you that Ariel Francisco’s fourth collection, All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins, is being released by Burrow Press this month!
In this collection, Ariel mourns his native Miami in this elegiac elegistic meditation on how home can be shaped by climate change and gentrification. Even more special, is that this is a bilingual edition–Spanish translations by Ariel himself appear beside the original English text.
Ariel is no stranger to the QC MFA blog–you may remember his poem in The New Yorker–but you may want to check out our virtual alumni bookshelf to see just how many books our alums have published:
It’s official: MFA alum Liv Mammone’s first book of poetry, Fire in the Waiting Room, is coming out with Game Over Books next August!
Although this is her first collection, Liv is no stranger to publication, having been included in five different anthologies since her MFA, as well as being selected as Poem-a-Day on both the Academy of American Poets website and The Poetry Foundation.
After her MFA, Liv competed team for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team and appeared in the play The Fall of All Atomic Angels as part of a festival that was named Best of Off Off Broadway by Time Out Magazine. We were already super proud of her, and we continue to be overjoyed by her success!
Liv is just one of our many success stories here at the Queens College MFA Program. If you’d like to learn more about our alumni, please head to our community page:
Queens College is committed to bringing writers and artists whose work speaks to the diverse community of our campus and our borough, which is why we are so proud to welcome cartoonist, writer, educator, and teaching artist Ivan Velez Jr. to campus on October 23rd.
Velez will be with us all day, visiting Professor Orchard’s contemporary Latinx Literature class and giving, not one, but two comics workshops for the QC community.
This event is co-sponsored by Writers at Queens, The English Department, The MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, The MFA in Social Practice, and The Program in Latino Studies, and in celebration of Queens College Hispanic Heritage Month.
Bio:
Ivan Velez Jr. is a Latino American cartoonist, writer, educator, and teaching artist known for the creation of the groundbreaking comic book series Tales of the Closet, and for his pioneering work with Milestone Media, Marvel, and DC Comics. He’s currently an independent cartoonist, and a teaching artist in New York and forever toils on his Creative Capital Award-winning comics project The Ballad of Wham Kabam.
Schedule:
Visiting Professor Alaya Dawn Johnson has been chosen for the shortlist for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction!
The prestigious Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. Just ten books were chosen by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, with the final winner to be chosen by a selection panel of authors: Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Each year, we invite a new writer to teach with us every year so that students can dive further into different aspects and genres of writing and get a fresh perspective on their work. Alaya Dawn Johnson has definitely continued in our tradition of great Visiting Professors! Her nomination for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, as well as her recent win of the Best Fiction for Younger Readers Award by the British Science Fiction Association, shows the kind of expertise you can expect from our faculty!
Congratulations to Alaya for this incredible nomination! We’re hoping for more good news when the final winner will be announced on October 21st!
That’s right, our very own Director, Jason Tougaw made the homepage of Salon this week with his article “Dems, listen to Eminem’s one-man culture war.”
Salon has been a trusted destination for progressive journalism since 1995, so Jason’s exploration of Eminem’s evolving political consciousness is the perfect piece to be number one this week in this essential publication!
You should go check it out right now:
https://www.salon.com/2024/08/30/eminem-slim-shady-democrats
Writers at Queens is proud to present a reading by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Johnson is this year’s visiting faculty at the Queens College MFA Program and, fresh off her win of Ursula K. Le Guin Award, will be reading from her impressive body of work.
After the reading, Johnson will join in a conversation with the QC community led by MFA alum Megan Pindling, which will be followed by a reception with refreshments and books for sale.
We hope you take the chance to meet and greet this award-winning author! Admission is free to all, and will also be streamed over Zoom, via the URL below. We hope to see you there!
September 30th at 7PM
Queens College
Choral Room 264, Aaron Copland School of Music
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81060471449?pwd=nkqiiFe3dlrDeuU4KBYz1ERqo53aBR.1
BIO:
Alaya Dawn Johnson is an award-winning author of speculative fiction for adults and young adults. Her most recent adult novel, Trouble the Saints, was the recipient of the World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her short story collection, Reconstruction, was published by Small Beer Press in January 2021. Her latest YA novel, The Library of Broken Worlds, is a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin award. She is current a Visiting Professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at CUNY Queens College.
MFA alum Chandanie Somwaru has just been named a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
The Poetry Foundation awards five Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships annually. Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the US, the $27,000 prize is intended to support exceptional US poets between 21 and 31 years of age.
The fellowships were established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly and expanded in 2013 with a gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund.
Chandanie won the Birdhouse Chapbook Prize from Ghostbird Press for Urgent \\ Where the Mind Goes \\ Scattered (2021) when she graduated, so we knew she was destined for great things. Her writing has been published in Poem-A-Day, Honey Literary, Solstice, SWWIM, The Margins, and other outlets.
Congratulations, Chandanie!
Our own Jason Tougaw has an interview in Psychology Today with Iraq War veteran Michael Ramos about Ramos’ memoir The After: A Veteran’s Notes on Coming Home. In the interview, Tougaw and Ramos explore writing for multiple audiences and other craft issues arising from depicting his experience as a soldier.
There’s a reason why Psychology Today listed this under their Emotional Essential reads! Go find out for yourself while you read the interview for yourself:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-elusive-brain/202408/a-soldiers-perspective
