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.

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is an NEA Creative Writing Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a RedLine Artist In-Residence and a Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India). Her third book, A Catalog of Future Mercies was released from Graywolf Press in 2026. She has two films, Dogana/Chapti (2019, Official Selection at Frameline43 and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India), Revry, as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” She has recent or forthcoming publications with The Academy of American Poets, Texas Review, CHUM Seattle, Either/Or, Burrow Press Review, Sink, Foglifter, and the anthology Alone Together: Love , Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Washington State Book Award, 2021). She also has critical essays in Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna Collective, 2019), Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Anthology on Anti-Racism and Repair in the Arts (Np Press, 2027) and in the republication of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (Sinister Wisdom, 2023). She has been featured on Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Off the Shelf with Helena de Groot, NPR’s Great American Folk Show with Tom Brosseau as well as Shin Yu Pai’s podcast, Ten Thousand Things. Serena is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com

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.