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Reading Series

Our Reading Series presents free literary readings and discussions that are open to the public. The series is co-sponsored by USF’s MFA program and English department. All readings are held on USF's main campus.

 

Spring 2021 MFA Reading Series

Aya de Leon

Aya de León

Professor de León is a Cave Canem fellow, a VONA alumna, and the author of five books, including Side Chick Nation, the first novel published about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Her latest novel is A Spy in the Struggle, about FBI infiltration of a Bay Area movement for climate justice and Black Lives. A two-time winner of the International Latino Book Award, her novels have won multiple Independent Publisher awards. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Ebony, Essence, Guernica, Ploughshares, and on Def Poetry. In 2022, Candlewick will publish Aya’s first young adult novel in a Black/Latina spy girl series. She is the director of June Jordan's Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, teaching poetry and spoken word.

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Elissa Washuta

Elissa Washuta

Elissa Washuta is the author of the nonfiction collections My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014), Starvation Mode (2018), and White Magic (forthcoming, Tin House Books). With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. She is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

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Deborah Miranda

Deborah A. Miranda

Deborah A. Miranda is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), recipient of the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award; and four poetry collections: Altar for Broken Things (2020), Raised by Humans (2015), The Zen of La Llorona (2005), and Indian Cartography (1999). She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, and her work has appeared in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: An Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). She is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California.

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Theresa Warburton

Theresa Warburton

Theresa Warburton is the author of Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Literatures in Contemporary Anarchist Movements (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press). With Elissa Washuta, she is co-editor of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University where she is also affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Canadian-American Studies. She lives on Lummi, Nooksack, and Coast Salish Territories in Bellingham, WA.

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Fall 2020 MFA Reading Series

Saeed Jones

Saeed Jones

Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award, a 2020 Publishing Triangle Award, and a 2020 Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his dog Caesar.

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Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty is the author of Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Body Wars. She is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard (forthcoming, 2021). Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, won the 2018 Paterson Prize. For many years, Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She directs creative writing at Carlow University where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and is Distinguished Writer in Residence of the MFA program.

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Reading Series Archive

The Emerging Writers Festival

Co-sponsored by the English department and MFA program, the Emerging Writers Festival features two days of readings by five up-and-coming writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. On the second day of the festival, the authors hold a panel discussion on their experiences navigating life as a writer and the complexities of the publishing industry.