Peter Orner is the author of two story collections, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, and two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for […]

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His research-based work revolves largely around language and sociopolitical dynamics. Directly informed by Historic narratives, material significance, and geography, his subject matter deals with circumstances where power relations are unbalanced. As a naturalized American, his investigation of cultural markers are embedded in objects, […]

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature, is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University […]

Việt Thanh Nguyễn’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel […]

Professor Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose credits include the documentaries, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha and Who Killed Vincent Chin? Her films have premiered at the Cannes, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, San Francisco, Sundance and Toronto film festivals and the Whitney Biennial. Her current works are the documentary and transmedia project, No Más […]

Sesshu Foster is a poet, teacher, and community activist born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing, and community organizing. His first collection of poetry, City Terrace Field Manual (1996), celebrates the neighborhood Foster grew up in. He has said that […]

Toni Jensen’s first story collection, From the Hilltop, was published through the Native Storiers Series at the University of Nebraska Press. Her stories have been published in journals such as Ecotone, Denver Quarterly, and Fiction International and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best of the Southwest, and Best of the West: […]

James Janko refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III in 1970. His medals include the Bronze Star for Valor, which he returned to the U.S. government in 1986 to protest their involvement in wars in Central America. In […]

This event will feature undergraduate student readings.