Join the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers for our annual Literary Arts Festival! All events are free and open to the public.
3pm: Literary Publishing Panel with Emily Stokes, Peter Gizzi, and Dan Bevacqua
6pm: Reading with Jordy Rosenberg & Fred Moten with Brandon Lopez
8pm: LiveLit Reading with Current MFA Students
11am: New student Q&A with current students
12pm: Lunch with faculty
1pm: Brief campus tour
3pm: Editing and Publishing Panel (Poetry) with Suzanna Tamminen, Peter Gizzi, Abby Chabitnoy
3pm: Editing and Publishing Panel (Prose) with Ben Brooks, Iwalani Kim, Gabriel Bump
6pm: Alumni Reading with Sarah Ghazal Ali, Thérèse Soukar Chehade, Nathan Hill, and Daniel Moysaenko
7pm: Reception
Fred Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson's Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the winner of the California Book Award; The Little Edges, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (Wesleyan University Press, 2015); The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017); All That Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019); and Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023). With Stefano Harney, Moten is coauthor of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), and All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). Moten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Macarthur Fellowship, and the inaugural Roy Lichtenstein Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reading Group Records released the album Fred Moten, Brandon López, Gerald Cleaver in 2022.
Brandoz Lopez (Born 1988 in Passaic NJ) is a composer and contrabassist working in the field of far left musics, with a primary focus in improvisation. Since his recent move to New York City, he’s become one of the most in demand players of his generation. He’s performed with the world's luminary improvisors and musical thinkers in squats and decorated concert halls. He was the 2018 Artist in Residence at Issue Project Room and the 2018 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette Intermediary. His third album as a soloist, Quoniam Facta Sum Vilis, can be found on the Astral Spirits label.
Jordy Rosenberg is the author of the novels Confessions of the Fox (2018) and Night Night Fawn (2026) both from Random House/One World, as well as a scholarly monograph about 18th-century religious enthusiasts. Confessions of the Fox was a New York Times Editors Choice selection, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, the UK Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award, and longlisted for The Dublin Literary Award. Confessions has been recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press, among other places, as one of the Best Books of 2018, and is published by Atlantic Books in the UK, Allen & Unwin in Australia/New Zealand, and Paseka in Czechia. Jordy’s work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, The Lannan Foundation, The Banff Centre, The Ahmanson-Getty Foundation, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. Jordy is a professor in the Department of English and Associated MFA Faculty in the Program for Poets and Writers at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a Pakistani American writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, California Book Award, and Julie Suk Award, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, among others.A finalist for a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, she has been awarded The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in journals and outlets including The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. Sarah is a Stadler and Kundiman fellow, the poetry editor for West Branch, and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. She lives and teaches in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the #1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. It was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Best Debut. Nathan’s second novel, Wellness, was also a New York Times bestseller and was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. It was selected as one of the best books of the year by NPR, Amazon, Audible, The Times, and others. His books have been published worldwide in more than two dozen languages. In France, Wellness was the winner of the prestigious Grand Prix of American Literature, as well as the Book of the Year prize from the Deauville Film Festival. Nathan has also written nonfiction for Wired, ESPN the Magazine, The Times of London, Poets & Writers, and the New York Times Book Review. A native Iowan, Nathan lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.
Daniel Moysaenko is the author of Overtakelessness (Graywolf Press, 2026), winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. His poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. His critical writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review. His translations have appeared in Asymptote, the Financial Times, and several anthologies of Ukrainian poetry. A two-time National Poetry Series finalist, he is the recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship. After a decade of teaching writing and international literature in Massachusetts, Florida, and Ohio as an adjunct professor and working in editorial and programming roles at the Poetry Foundation, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere, he retrained as a lawyer. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, PhD from Florida State University, and JD from Case Western Reserve University. Raised in the Ukrainian diaspora, he lives in Ohio's Chagrin Valley.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Thérèse Soukar Chehade made her way to Massachusetts in August of 1983, eight years after the start of the Lebanese civil war. She writes in English, her third language (she is also fluent in Arabic and French). The war, as well as the memories she thought she left behind, crept into her stories, and she let them stay. Her first novel, Loom, came out in 2010 from Syracuse University Press and won the Arab American Book Award for fiction the following year. It tells the story of the Zaydan family, caught between their memories of Lebanon's civil war and a fierce Vermont blizzard. Her latest work, We Walked On, won the 2025 Arab American Award for Fiction. Published by Regal House Publishing in September 2024, the novel follows Hisham, a thirty-year-old Arabic teacher, and Rita, his fourteen-year-old student, as their lives are upended by the Lebanese civil war. The novel was a 2022 Noemi Press Prose Award semifinalist and was longlisted for the 2022 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. Now settled in Granby, Massachusetts, Thérèse Soukar Chehade continues to weave her past into her present.
Emily Stokes is the Editor of The Paris Review. She is the sixth Editor in the sixty-eight-year history of the magazine. Stokes was previously a senior editor at The New Yorker. Ms. Stokes was also an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and the Financial Times. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and was a Kennedy Memorial Trust scholar at Harvard.
Iwalani Kim is an associate literary agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. She represents character-driven upmarket and literary fiction, particularly stories with a strong sense of place or voice, as well as narrative nonfiction, including memoir, cultural histories, and cultural criticism. Her clients include Naomi Xu Elegant, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Reena Shah, Alice Evelyn Yang, and others. Iwalani grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, studied Political Science and German Studies at Vassar College, and now lives in Queens, New York.
Ben Brooks is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Brazilian literature. He translated Solitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz, published by Astra House (US) and Knopf (Canada). He is a Fulbright Scholar, a 2024 Periplus Fellow, and an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Workshop. He acquires and edits fiction, non-fiction, and poetry at MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Some of the writers he works with include Caleb Femi, Roya Marsh, Carol Bensimon, Dimitry Elias Léger, Carlos Fonseca, Clara Drummond, Geovani Martins, and David Martinez. He reads in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.
Dan Bevacqua was born in New Jersey and grew up in Vermont. He earned his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His short stories have been published in The Paris Review, The Literary Review, Electric Literature, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He lives in Western Massachusetts. Molly Bit is his first novel.
Suzanna Tamminen is the Director and Editor-in-Chief at Wesleyan University Press, where she has made important acquisitions in poetry, dance, and Connecticut history. She is the sponsoring editor of, among many more titles, Rae Armantrout’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Versed, Jean Valentine’s National Book Award winning collection Door in the Mountain, Liz Lerman’s Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance, Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea, Mel Goldstein’s Dr. Mel’s Connecticut Climate Book, and Dan DeLuca’s The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend. She also oversees the dance and humanities website Accelerated Motion.