New Writing Series Fall 2008

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of the novels Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman. Her work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, Georgia Review and the Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a NEA Fellowship, she teaches writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Sesshu Foster, Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for more than 20 years. He's also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Santa Cruz and in the MFA program of the California Institute for the Arts. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry and, recently, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. Recordings of L.A. area readings are archived at http://ww.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, http://ww.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.

Aaron Kunin, Wednesday, November 5, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Aaron Kunin lives in Los Angeles and is assistant professor of English at Pomona College, specializing in early modern literature and with broad research interests in poetry and poetics. He is a poet, critic, novelist, and author of a collection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005); a chapbook, Secret Architecture (Braincase, 2006); and a novel, The Mandarin (Fence, 2008). He is currently working on two critical projects that come out of Hobbes's theory of artificial personhood: the first is about making a person, and the second is about preserving human values in the form of an artifact. He is also working on a poem about the United Fruit Company. Another collection, The Sore Throat and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fence in 2010.

Debra Diblasi, Amina Cain, Cris Mazza, Laynie Browne: Wreckage of Reason, Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the UCSD Geisel Library, Dr. Seuss Room
	In this diverse and comprehensive volume, the writers have manipulated traditional ways of storytelling, language, and plot, to express new and distinct ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Narrative form is subverted, provocative subject matter explored, and language takes on a scatological form to depict an authentic human experience that makes reading a truly participatory act.