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Visiting Writer Series

2023-2024

2022-2023

2021-2022

Obed Silva

Reading and Author Q&A
April 20, 2022
2-3:30 pm
Zoom

Obed Silva was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and grew up in Orange County, California.

Raised by a single mother who was often at work, Obed found comfort in the streets early on in his youth, joining a gang and dropping out of high school at age fourteen. After spending the next few years coming in and out of juvenile institutions, at age seventeen, Obed was shot in the back and left paralyzed from the waist down while participating in a liquor store robbery.  A year later, he found himself in a courtroom facing attempted murder charges for shooting a rival gang member. At the time, he was looking at serving a life sentence in prison. Ultimately, he was sentenced to five years on gang-terms probation. It was during this time that he committed himself to a life of education, earning an associate of arts degree at Cypress College before attending Cal State, Los Angeles, where he later earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a master’s degree in English.

Obed teaches English at East Los Angeles College. The Death of My Father the Pope is the first of his two memoirs to be published. He is currently completing his second memoir, In The Hands of My Mother.

2020-2021

John Murillo

Reading and Author Q&A
April 15, 2021
2-3:30 pm
Zoom

John Murillo is the author of the poetry  collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020). His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recent poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an assistant professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University.

 

 

Alex Espinoza

Reading and Author Q&A
October 23, 2020
1-2:30 pm
Zoom

Alex Espinoza earned his MFA from UC Irvine and is the author of the novels Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego León, both from Random House. His newest book is Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. He’s written for the LA Times, the NY Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and NPR's All Things Considered. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the MacDowell Colony, as well as an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, he is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside and is completing a new novel.

 

Malaka Gharib

Reading and Author Q&A
September 29, 2020
2-3:30 pm
Zoom

Malaka Gharib is an artist, journalist, and writer based in Washington, D.C. She is the founder of The Runcible Spoon, a food zine, and the co-founder of the D.C. Art Book Fair. Malaka is also deputy editor and digital strategist of Goats and Soda, NPR's global health and development blog. She reports on topics such as the humanitarian aid sector, gender equality, and innovation in the developing world. Malaka lives in a row house with her husband Darren and her 9-year-old rice cooker.

Photo © Ben de la Cruz

2019-2020

Angela Morales 

Reading and Author Q&A
November 12, 2019
1-2:30 pm
Room: FA 133

Angela Morales, a graduate of the University of Iowa's  nonfiction writing program, is the author of The Girls in My Town, a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, Harvard Review, The Southern Review,The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Review, Arts and Letters, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, Hobart, River Teeth, Under the Sun, and Puerto del Sol, and The Indianola Review. She is the winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, 2014, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. Her book is the 2017 winner of the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Currently she teaches composition and creative writing at Glendale Community College and is working on her second collection of essays. She lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband Patrick and their two children, Mira and Leo.

 

Grace Talusan

 Reading and Author Q&A
 April 27, 2020
 1-2:30 pm
 Zoom

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England.   As a toddler, she came to the US with her parents from the Philippines. She grew up in New England and became a US citizen in her twenties. She thought she was going to be a physician, like her parents, but while attending Tufts University, she decided to become a writer. She graduated from the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine and then taught in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. She returned to Tufts University, where for many years, she taught writing in the English Department and courses in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has published in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and many others. She is a longtime member and teacher at Grub Street, an independent creative writing center, and lives outside of Boston with her husband. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.