Living Writers Series – Winter 2025

Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes

About the Living Writers Series

The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

About the writer

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NY Times editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world and was selected as one of the NYTimes and NPR’s best books of 2024. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).