Living Writers Fall 2026 – OPEN SEASON: WRITING ENACTS features writers, performers and artists who explore what it means to encounter invisibility and silence, while simultaneously engaging with the insistent specters of hypervisibility and experiences of race, gender, and sexuality. These writers and artists work on the page, screen, stage and beyond. Often targeted, they create works that resist, taking aim back with intent, always remaining open, spirited and deeply alive in this complex season.

Truong Tran is a poet, visual artist, and teacher born in Saigon, Vietnam. His new book is How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir, published by City Lights in October 2026. His book-length poetry project Book of the Other: Small in Comparison (2021) received an American Book Award in 2022. He is the author of seven other collections, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 words (with Damon Potter), and Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking (with Damon Potter). He also written the children’s book Going Home Coming Home and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems and books have been translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in. Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Northeastern University, Oakland.

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.

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, Morton Marcus Poetry Reading Series, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Bay Tree Books.