Spring 2023 Creative Writing Presenters
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Lisbeth White
Thursday, February 16th • 7:00 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
Lisbeth White is a writer and ritualist currently living on unceded S'Klallam and Chimacum lands of the Coast Salish peoples. Her books include the poetry collection American Sycamore, winner of the 2022 Perugia Press prize, and the forthcoming Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, essays, and prompts for manifesting liberation and reclaiming power (North Atlantic Books, May 2023). As a writer, she has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from VONA, Callaloo, Tin House, Split This Rock, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and Blue Mountain Center. As a healer and ritualist, she has been a facilitator of community-based healing justice work utilizing arts and Earth-based practices within social justice organizations nationwide.
“Early in her book American Sycamore, made of poems as formally adventurous and probing and searching as the questions she asks, questions that might never be answered—about family, history, empire, violence, love—Lisbeth White writes, almost as a kind of prayer: ‘the bones the bones know who i am.’ The bones of course are the literal bones—of who came before us, of who loved us before we were born, of who were brutalized in the uncountable, unsayable ways. But the bones are also the poems she has crafted. Which is to say, what music she’s grown from the sorrow.”
—Ross Gay
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Ousmane K. Power-Greene
Thursday, March 2nd • 7:00 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
Ousmane K. Power-Greene is the Program Director of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Clark University. Power-Greene is the author of the novel The Confessions of Matthew Strong and the study of anticolonialist agitation, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement. His writing appears in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters. He’s been featured on All Things Considered, C-SPAN Book TV, and NPR’s history podcast Throughline.
“A terrifying page-turner…The racial violence in the story is raw and unsettling, but it underscores the message here—that radical ideology is an enemy to be taken seriously.”
—NPR, Best Books of the Year, on The Confessions of Matthew Strong
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Alexander Chee
Tuesday, March 21st • 7:00 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
“These essays feel like a life's wisdom, salvaged from a great fire. I feel in possession of a map of secrets and second chances, holding an inheritance whose gifts have only been partially revealed to me. But these essays are more than maps; for me, as a younger writer, they are the very ground, the earth made solid enough so that I might stand here, made rich enough so that I might plant here, and, thrive here. This book makes me feel possible.”
—Ocean Vuong on How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
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Victor Yang
Thursday, March 30th • 7:00 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
Victor Yang is a queer writer and educator based in Boston by way of China, Canada, and Kentucky. His writing has been published in Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Review, and The Southern Review. His work was included in Best Small Fictions 2021. He was a 2020 Boston Artist-in-Residence, the 2018 Chertkov Fellow at the Blue Mountain Center, and he received scholarships to the Iceland Writers Retreat and the New Orleans Writers Residency. Among other distinctions, he also has a PhD in Politics from Oxford and was a Rhodes Scholar. He is currently visiting assistant professor of English and Consortium for Faculty Diversity post-doctoral fellow at Amherst College. The proud son of Chinese immigrants, he has also been fighting for immigrant and labor justice for over a decade.
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Vi Khi Nao
Wednesday, April 26th • 7:00 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
Vi Khi Nao is an interdisciplinary artist who works in multiple and interchangeable mediums. Her work includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her drawings have appeared in literary journals such as NOON and The Adirondack Review. Her video, digital, and literary installations have been exhibited at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in Providence in Rhode Island and in the largest exhibition halls for contemporary art in Europe, Malmö Konsthall, in Sweden. She is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her first play, Waiting for God, is out of Apocalypse Party in January 2022. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain.
“In this jagged and unforgettable work, Vi Khi Nao takes on a domestic story of losing one’s children and elevates it to Greek tragedy. Refusing sentimentality and realism, she shows how personal devastation can feel, to the sufferer, as powerful and enduring as myth.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen on Fish in Exile