The Spring 2015 Living Writers Series is focused on flexible forms and mixed media. You can expect writers and artists working in and across a number of forms, and through a variety of media to include poetry, fiction, film, graphic art, dance, and music. Each of the writers and artists featured in this series combines multiple genres and materials, whether textual, sonic, visual, and/or embodied to explore intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and class in their written, screened, and staged performances.

The Living Writers Series is a free and public event held Thursdays, 6:00-7:45 pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206. For more information, please email rvwilson@ucsc.edu

Sarah Manguso

is an essayist and poet. Her new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, is out now. Her five other books include The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, named one of the top ten books of 2012 by Salon, and The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, and her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. She grew up near Boston and now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. She can be found online at: http://www.sarahmanguso.com/

Maggie Nelson

is a nonfiction writer, critic, scholar, and poet. Her works of nonfiction include The Argonauts, a work of “autotheory” about gender, sexuality, (queer) family, and the limitations and possibilities of language; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice; the cult hit Bluets (2009); a critical study of poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007); and a memoir about sexual violence and media spectacle titled The Red Parts (2007), which will be reissued by Graywolf in Spring 2016. Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007); Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). Her awards include a 2007 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2013 Literature grant from Creative Capital. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. She currently lives in Los Angeles. She can be found online at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maggie-nelson

Spring 2015 Living Writer Series:
April 16: Janice Lee
April 23: Terri Witek, Jai Arun Ravine
April 30: Marilyn Chin
May 7: Jared Harvey, Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, Whitney De Vos, Nicholas James Whittington, Eric Sneathen
May 14: Dawn Lundy Martin
May 21: Eleni Sikelianos, Josef Sikelianos
May 28: Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson
June 4: Student Reading
June 11: Senior Projects Reading