New Writing Series

Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist. She was born in Donetsk and fled the war in 2014 to settle in Kyiv. Shortly after arriving, she began shifting from writing in her native Russian to writing in her second language, Ukrainian. She is the author of two volumes of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and translation. She is currently a fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

Co-sponsored by the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 22. a “Working Life”, their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

Co-sponsored by the LOFT 

Ann Hui, Hong New Wave filmmaker, presents Elegies, a film on poetry in contemporary Hong Kong.

Zeinabu Irene Davis, UCSD Communications professor and filmmaker, presents Pandemic Bread, a film based on a true story by Marivi Soliven about a life-changing end-of-life call between three women -- a doctor, a patient, and a Filipina translator -- in the early days of the pandemic.

Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans femme artist and author. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, MoMA.org, The Boston Review and The Georgia Review amongst other publications. Her book Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda finalist.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man.

Lizz Huerta, a Mexi-Rican short story writer and essayist, is the author of the novel, The Lost Dreamer. Her short story “The Wall” is included in the anthology A People’s Future of the United States. Huerta has also been a 2018 Bread Loaf Fellow, a five-time VONA Fellow, and the winner of the LUMINA fiction contest selected by Roxane Gay, who called her writing “a menacing inescapable seduction.” A San Diego native, she has taught creative writing to homeless youth through San Diego nonprofit So Say We All.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the essay collections, The Witch of Eye and Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, and three poetry collections, Rue, The End of Pink, and Rag & Bone. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the NEA, H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, and American Antiquarian Society, and she was awarded the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.

Poet Laureate of the city of San Diego, Jason Magabo Perez is the author of two hybrid collections of poetry and prose: a chapbook, Phenomenology of Superhero (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016); and a full-length debut, This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017). A VONA/Voices alumnus, Perez's writing has appeared in Witness, TAYO, vitriol, Eleven Eleven, Mission at Tenth, and The Feminist Wire. Perez is Program Director of the Ethnic Studies Department at CSU San Marcos.

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gutiérrez credits the queer and feminist diy, post-punk zine culture of the 1990s, plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships, for introducing her/them to the various vibrant art and music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is/They are faculty for Oregon State University–Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Gutiérrez calls Tucson, Arizona, home.

George Abraham (they/he/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, performance artist, and writer from Jacksonville, FL. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and the Big Other Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, and more. They are currently a Litowitz MFA+MA student in Poetry at Northwestern University. He is currently Executive Editor of the Whiting Award winning journal Mizna.

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the Director of the American Indian Studies Program and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science. She is the author of the 2022 poetry collection, Trickster Academy.

A reading by three members of the MFA faculty who have had books released in the past year.