Into Archives—Across Genres is a reading/performance series featuring poets, critics, memoirists, activists, visual artists, essayists, short story writers, and novelists who mine various archives to investigate race, gender, sexuality, and class. Writing across multiple disciplines – whether via the epistle, film & photo essay, poem, story, collage or hybrid text – these authors mine history and present day experience, exploring and complicating the possibilities and features of genre in their art.

Peter Orner is the author of four books of fiction including, Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. His first book, Esther Stories, will be re-issued next year with a forward by Marilynne Robinson. His latest collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge will also be published next year. Recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orner is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Co-Sponsored by Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund; Poets & Writers through the grant from the James Irvine Foundation; Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center; Literature Department and the Creative Writing Program; UC Presidential Chair Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies; Music Department; Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment; The Ethnic Resource Centers and the African American Resource & Cultural Center; Institute for Humanities Research.