Sandra Lim is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her previous books of poetry are The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her writing has appeared in a range of literary journals, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, The Baffler, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. Her poems and essays are anthologized in Counterclaims (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020), The Poem’s Country (Pleiades Press, 2018), The Echoing Green (The Modern Library, 2016), and Among Margins (Ricochet Editions, 2016).

Sandra’s honors include a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2015 Levis Reading Prize for The Wilderness, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Foundation. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and also serves on the poetry faculty in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

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

Please note: this event is scheduled to be in-person in Humanities Lecture Hall and the location/in-person feature is subject to change.

Change Me: Stories of Radical Transformation – A Living Writers Series

After a long period of sheltering in place and an even longer period of restricting our daily movements, many of us are ready for change. This winter’s living writers all have stories of radical transformation to tell. TC Tolbert searches for a language to enact his transition from being Melissa to being TC; Jane Wong struggles to reconcile her American present with the transnational ghosts of her past; Yuri Herrera’s heroine embarks on a journey across the Mexican American border; Karen Tei Yamashita tells tales of ever changing demographics & invisible histories; Eric Wat’s protagonist remakes himself as he navigates drug abuse, sexuality, death and family dynamics; the speaker in Sandra Lim’s book of poems transforms not her life but the way she sees her life. All six writers remind us of the power of literature to transform us. They remind us that when we open a book, often what we’re really saying is: change me.

See the full list of Living Writers Series events on the Creative Writing Program page.