Please join us for the 2022 Creative Writing MFA Alumni Symposium ft. Jackson Bliss, Patricia Hartland, Katie Lattari, Ae Hee Lee, Monica Mody, and Blake Sanz. Funding for the Sayers/Gernes Series comes from the generous assistance of MFA Alumna Jessica Maich.
Wednesday April 20th (7:00 PM | 232 Decio Hall)
Jackson Bliss
Katie Lattari
Blake Sanz
Thursday April 21st (5:00 PM | 232 Decio Hall)
"Life After the MFA" Panel
Thursday April 21st (7:30 PM | 232 Decio Hall)
Ae Hee Lee
Patricia Hartland
Monica Mody
Jackson Bliss (2007) is the 2007 Sparks Prize winner. He is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Fiction International, Pleiades, Hobart, African American Review, Stand (UK), 3:am Magazine, and the Huffington Post UK, among others. He earned his MA in English and his PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from USC where he was a FLAS fellow in Japanese, a College Merit Award Fellow, and a two-time ACE/Nikaido grant recipient. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writing at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss.
Katie Lattari [Luh-tairy] holds degrees from the University of Maine and the University of Notre Dame. Her first novel, American Vaudeville, a small indie press work, was published in 2016 and had previously been a semi-finalist in Subito Press's annual fiction contest in 2013. Her short fiction has been published in such places as NOO Journal, The Bend, Stolen Island, Cabildo Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, The Writing Disorder, and more. Her short story "No Protections, Only Powers" was a finalist in the Neoverse Short Story Writing Competition and later anthologized in Threads: A Neoverse Anthology. On September 14, 2021, her debut thriller Dark Things I Adore was published by Sourcebooks Landmark. Dark Things I Adore was an Apple Books Best Book of the Month pick for September 2021, received a starred review from Library Journal, and has been featured in the Crime & Mystery section of The New York Times Book Review. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Katie now lives in Bangor, Maine, with her husband Kevin, and their cat, Alex.
Patricia Hartland is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at UMass Amherst and was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and recent recipient of fellowships from France's Centre Nationale du Livre, Summer Literary Seminars, and the BANFF centre. Their poetry collection LINGUABRASIONS is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press, and their translations of Monchoachi's LIBERAMERICA and BLACK AND BLUE PARTITION are forthcoming from Litmus Press and The Operating System, respectively.
Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee is the author of Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press 2017), Dear bear, (Platypus Press 2021), and Connotary (Bull City Press 2021), which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her poems can be found at Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others.
Monica Mody is the author of Kala Pani (1913 Press), the forthcoming Bright Parallel (Copper Coin), and three chapbooks including Ordinary Annals (above/ground press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies including Extinction Violin: The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, What is Time: An Anthology of New Indian Writing, Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent, and &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. Her poetry also appears in Poetry International, Indian Quarterly, Almost Island, Boston Review, and other literary magazines. Her academic writing can be found in The Land Remembers Us and Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis. Mody's creative and critical writing aligns with earth-based relational worldviews. She has been a recipient of the Sparks Prize Fellowship (Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa), and a Toto Award for Creative Writing—and, for her doctoral research on decolonial feminist consciousness in South Asian borderlands, the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology. Monica was born in Ranchi, India, and currently lives in San Francisco, Ramaytush Ohlone lands.
Blake Sanz is the author of a collection of stories, The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, which won the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award, selected by Brandon Taylor. His stories have appeared in Ecotone, American Short Fiction, Joyland, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines. He teaches writing at the University of Denver.
Originally published at english.nd.edu.