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Events

Rise, Resist, Repeat – 12/4

December 4 | 6:30 PM
Free on Zoom

If you’re looking for something to do after the MFA Open House this Thursday, you can catch our very own Kimiko Hahn at this virtual reading and conversation for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), which will explore community building and social change!

Literary leaders practice fostering communities in all kinds of ways – some quiet, some raucous. Poems can bring communities together to celebrate, to mourn and even to push for change. At this reading, audiences will hear from some of the most seasoned literary artists in the field as they discuss the ways they engage with challenges, both large and small, in their communities.

Camille T. Dungy, Kimiko Hahn, Tyehimba Jess and Paul “Con Queso” LaTorre will explore the connection between poetry and social change. Each poet will read their own work, respond to their colleagues’ poetry and share their advice for using verses to advocate for a better future.

Register here
This event is part of the Dodge Poetry Series
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Events

MFA Open House – 12/4

December 4
5-6 PM
Zoom

We’re hosting our annual Open House for the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation on December 4  (5-6 PM, via Zoom). If you or anyone you know is interested in studying creative writing or translation, please come learn more!

QC MFA Students, Gianna Baez (front), Cydni Thompson, Mundo Rivera, and Chaim Wachsberger (back), at the recent Hudson Valley Writers Center emerging writers showcase.

QC’s MFA Program is supportive and friendly, with a strong sense of community. We are proud of our students and alumni. To take a look at some of their many accomplishments, click here. We offer tracks in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Translation—and encourage cross-genre exploration. Our 80-campus is lively and verdant. 

To register, click here. 

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News

Another Successful Brainstorm

Brainstorm, our student-run reading series, had another successful reading, this time at The Queensboro. We just wanted to share some pictures, so you can see what you may have missed out on!

Be sure to keep reading this blog for more Brainstorm events!  

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News

Sonia Arora – Birdhouse Prize

We are thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2025 Ghostbird Press Birdhouse Chapbook Prize is Sonia Arora for her manuscript, Rewilding the Home and the World.

Sonia’s chapbook will be published this spring. Please stay tuned for details about a book launch and reading to be held here at Queens College!

Congratulations to Sonia on this wonderful accomplishment!

Sonia Arora has been teaching literature and humanities for almost 20 years. Her work as a teaching artist takes her into classrooms across Long Island, New York City and Philadelphia where she explores oral history, digital media, poetry, activism, and film-making with youth in elementary, middle and high schools. She has published short fiction, poetry and essays. Publications include: Apiary; Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching; Prompted, an anthology printed by Philadelphia Stories, 3-2-1 Contact, Sonic Boom, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Biostories, Lunch Ticket and more. Last year, one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has studied writing with Frederic Tuten, Terrance Hayes, Porochista Khakpour, and Jenn Givhan. 

Ghostbird Press is a small, independent chapbook press that publishes collaborations of writing and visual art. Peter Vanderberg, a fellow QC MFA alum, offers the annual Birdhouse Prize to graduating QC MFA students, resulting in a gorgeous full-color chapbook for the winner.

Winning a chapbook prize with your thesis is only one of the great opportunities you get as a QC MFA student. Discover more on our Opportunities page!

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Events

Words Bridging Worlds: Arthur Sze, U.S. Poet Laureate

Monday, December 8 | 7 pm
Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library
Lecture Hall 230

We are so honored to announce that U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, will be visiting our campus on Monday, December 8. Sze chose our college specifically because of our first-generation immigrant population, and his talk will specifically involve translation of poetry from other languages.

After reading from his vast body of work, Sze will sit down with our own Distinguished Professor Kimiko Hahn, herself the Poet Laureate of New York State, for a star-studded conversation on poetry and translation.

Poet Laureate is the highest title a poet can be awarded from a government or institution. The fact that Sze is not only coming, but selected us as the first public reading he will give in this position, is a huge honor for us. Sze’s goal for his time as Poet Laureate is to create a new anthology of poems from various languages and time periods with new translations, making these past works breathe again.

We hope to see you all on campus, or over Zoom at the link below:

https://bit.ly/ZoomUSPoetLaureate

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News

John Weir Nominated for Pushcart Prize

This just in–our own Professor John Weir has been nominated for a Pushcart!

Here’s the catch: his short story “Starting From Paumonak” doesn’t come out in Epiphany for a few more weeks, so you can’t read it just yet–you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out when it drops!

The Pushcart Prizes celebrate the best work published in small presses over the course of a year. The annual anthology resulting from the prize is already itself of great renown, but also the Pushcart Prize series itself has been honored with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2005,[12] and the Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award in 2006.

If you think this is a big deal (and you’re right that it is) you should also check out what else our faculty are doing:

Faculty
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Events

Slapering Hol Press and HVWC Present the MFA Spotlight Reading

Nov 23, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Hudson Valley Writers Center
Sleepy Hollow, 300 Riverside Dr, Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591, USA

The fantastic indie press Slapering Hol is shining a spotlight on emerging writers in MFA programs with spotlight readings at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. Of course they chose four of our students to take place in their upcoming reading!

Go see these QC MFA candidates for an afternoon of poetry in the scenic and serene Hudson Valley!

  • Gianna Baez
  • Mundo Rivera
  • Cyndi Thompson
  • Chaim Wachsberger

Details at the link below!

https://www.writerscenter.org/event-details/slapering-hol-press-and-hvwc-present-the-mfa-spotlight-reading

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News

Alaya Dawn Johnson in the New York Times

It’s no secret that the fantasy genre is booming right now. (Maybe we all need to dwell in possibility right now?) The New York Times put together a best-of list of complex and poignant books from the darker side of the fantasy genre, so of course they included our own Alaya Dawn Johnson!

The article is called “Great Fantasy Novels With Unlikely Heroes” and focuses on antiheroes and outcasts. Alaya’s book, The Trouble With Saints, is set in a noirish alternate 1940s New York, which features a mixed-race woman passing for white and explores how even in a universe with people with extraordinary powers, they can still be constrained by the color line.

Definitely go read that article, and Alaya’s book when you have the chance!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/books/fantasy-books-antiheroes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

As a program, we’ve been so lucky to have Alaya Dawn Johnson here as part of our Visiting Professor program. Every year, we bring a new writer to campus in order to broaden the literary conversation we have here in the program. We’ve had fantasy and YA writers, graphic novelists, and translators teach here as part of that initiative.

To learn more about our current faculty, visit our faculty page through the link below:

Faculty
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News

Jason Tougaw in Inkwell

Our very own Director, Jason Tougaw, has a new essay in Inkwell called “To Protect a Hen,” which involves a fierce fight with a red-tailed hawk. You can read it for free on the Inkwell website:

https://www.mville.edu/english-creative-writing/creative-writing-mfa-inkwell.php

Inkwell is a publication of Manhattanville University and has a mission of bringing new and established writers into the national literary conversation.

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Events

Women Who Rock: Deborah Paredez & Ann Powers

Monday, November 17, 2025 • 7 pm
Choral Room, Music Building
or join us on Zoom

Writers at Queens, the college reading series sponsored by the MFA Program, is bringing you not one but two incredible music critics on November 17. Deborah Paredez and Ann Powers are coming to talk about music and culture with a feminist slant–women who rock should scare the misogynists out there, which should be all the more reason to attend!

And if you can’t make it to campus, you can always join us on Zoom:

Join us on Zoom

BIOS:

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the critical memoir American Diva (Norton 2024), the scholarly book Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, and the poetry collections This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), a New York Times “New and Notable Poetry Book.” She is associate professor and chair of creative writing at Columbia University and the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry.

Ann Powers is NPR Music’s critic and correspondent. Throughout a long career, she has worked at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024). With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited the classic anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop (1995). In 2017, she co-founded the award-winning NPR series Turning the Tables, which shed light on marginalized, underestimated, and forgotten voices in popular music. She lives with her family in Nashville.