Living Writers Series – Spring 2024

Imaginaries)Un(bound: Race, Justice, Writing: The Living Writers Series, the Center for Racial Justice, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) present poets, theorists, fiction and hybrid artists working at the nexus of creative-critical practice in the struggle for justice with the imperative of imaginatively undoing the academic and disciplinary strictures that bind critical scholarship.

Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut full-length poetry collection, Querida, was selected by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver De la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have also appeared in BOMB, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. His writing and teaching has been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Foundation. He is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kendall Grady is a poet scholar working the couplet as microsystem– contact zone–associative monad– elective affinity– allocentrism– affective capillary—baroque structure of intimacy. Selected poems live with Jupiter 88, Dusie, and The Atlas Review.