Juniper Literary Festival 2024

The MFA for Poets and Writers announces the Juniper Literary Festival 2024, which will take place Friday, April 5, and Saturday, April 6, 2024, on the UMass Amherst campus. This year’s festival is part of the MFA’s sixtieth anniversary celebrating The Writer in Community.  

All events are free and open to the public. 

A full schedule is as follows.  

The Writer’s Life
With Susan Straight, Yvette Ndlovu, and Edie Meidav
Friday, April 5, 2024, 2:30 p.m. 
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

Susan Straight’s ‘84MFA recent novel “Mecca” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022) was a national bestseller, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction. Her memoir, “In the Country of Women,” was named a best book of the year by NPR and Real Simple. Straight is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. In 2021, she was named Woman of the Year for the 61st Assembly District, by Assemblyman Jose Medina, for her thirty years of writing stories of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American and immigrant life in southern California, bringing little-known histories, especially of women, into American books, museums, magazines and libraries. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1988.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu ’23MFA is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, 2023) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest-winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, FANTASY Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, and Kweli Journal. 

Publishing in Today’s Market  
With agent/editor Anjali Singh 
April 5, 2024, 3:30 p.m.
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

Agent/editor Anjali Singh started her career in publishing in 1996 as a literary scout. Best known for championing “Persepolis,” the breakaway graphic memoir about the Iranian revolution and exile by Marjane Satrapi, Singh is the former editorial director at Other Press, and has also worked as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, and Vintage Books. Drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers, she has helped launch the careers of leading literary novelists including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Saleem Haddad, Samantha Hunt, and Preeta Samarasan. In her work as an agent, she represents: Susan Abulhawa, bestselling author of “Mornings in Jenin” and “Against the Loveless World;” Nawaaz Ahmed, author of the PEN-Faulkner finalist “Radiant Fugitives;” Mai Al-Nakib, author of “An Unlasting Home;” Bridgett Davis, author of the acclaimed memoir “The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers;”  and Rachel Harper, author of “The Other Mother.” Her graphic novel list includes Rhea Ewing’s “Fine: A Comic About Gender,” Gillian Goerz’s two “Shirley and Jamila” books, Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez’ “Wake: The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts,” and Deena Mohamed’s “Shubeik Lubeik” as well as new and forthcoming works by Gillian Goerz, Fouad Mezherm Tessa Hullsm Steenz, and Salman Toor. 

MFA Visiting Faculty Reading
With Hannah Brooks-Motl & Bianca Stone
April 5, 2024, 6 p.m.
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

Hannah Brooks-Motl ’13MFA is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019). Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and in edited collections from Cambridge University Press and Wesleyan University Press. With Stephanie Burt she helped edit Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (2005).  

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.  

LiveLit
April 5, 2024, 8 p.m.
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

LiveLit is a vibrant monthly reading series organized by students in the English Department’s MFA for Poets and Writers. Each reading features the talents of a graduate prose writer and poet, and the community is warmly invited to join! 

Publishing Chat
Carey Salerno of Alice James Books with MFA student Ide Thompson
April 6, 2024, 3:30 p.m.
Herter Hall, Room 231

Carey Salerno serves as the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of “Tributary” and “Shelter,” and a co-editor of “Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry” from Alice James Books. She serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine at Farmington.

MFA Alumni Reading
With Eric Baus ’05MFA, Rachel B. Glaser ’10MFA, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu ’23MFA, and Susan Straight ’84MFA
April 6, 2024, 6 p.m.
Herter Hall, Room 231

Eric Baus ’05MFA is the author of five books of poetry: “How I Became a Hum” (Octopus Books, 2020), “The Tranquilized Tongue” (City Lights 2014), “Scared Text” (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, “Tuned Droves” (Octopus Books, 2009) and “The To Sound” (Wave Books, 2004), winner of the Verse Prize. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently “The Rain Of The Ice” (Above/Ground Press 2014) and “Euphorbia” (Above/Ground Press 2019). His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian and Finnish.

Rachel B. Glaser ’10MFA is the author of the novel “Paulina & Fran”​​​​​​​, the short story collection ​​​​​​​”Pee On Water”​​​​​​​, and the poetry books “MOODS” and “HAIRDO”. Glaser studied painting at RISD and received her MFA in Creative Writing from UMass-Amherst. In 2017, she was on Granta's list of Best of Young American Novelists. Her fiction has been anthologized in New American Stories. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and teaches at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu ’23MFA is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection “Drinking from Graveyard Wells” (University Press of Kentucky, 2023) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her B.A. at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest-winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, FANTASY Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly and Kweli Journal.

Susan Straight’s ‘84MFA recent novel “Mecca” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022) was a national bestseller, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction. Her memoir, “In the Country of Women,” was named a best book of the year by NPR and Real Simple. Straight is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. In 2021, she was named Woman of the Year for the 61st Assembly District, by Assemblyman Jose Medina, for her thirty years of writing stories of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American and immigrant life in southern California, bringing little-known histories, especially of women, into American books, museums, magazines and libraries. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1988.