UMass MFA for Poets and Writers Presents Fall ‘24 Visiting Writers Series
Celebrating 61 years of free public readings
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The UMass MFA for Poets and Writers has announced the Fall ‘24 Visiting Writers Series. This year’s series features Hanif Abdurraqib, Rae Armantrout, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Yuri Herrera with translator Lisa Dillman. Readings are free, open to the public and will be held in the Old Chapel’s Great Hall. All events begin at 6 p.m.
Celebrating its sixty-first year, the nationally renowned Visiting Writers Series at UMass Amherst presents emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The series is sponsored by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action, and is made possible with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council, the Massachusetts Review, and the English Department. In addition, funding for the December 6 reading featuring Yuri Herrera and Lisa Dillman is underwritten, in part, by the Chancellor’s Community, Democracy, and Dialogue working group.
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Sept. 19, 2024, 6 p.m.
Old Chapel Great Hall
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog, his newest collection of poems, was published as volume 62 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series in September 2021.
In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice ... His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Oct. 24, 2024, 6 p.m.
Old Chapel Great Hall
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. His newest book is There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension with Random House. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Rae Armantrout
Nov. 14, 2024, 6 p.m.
Old Chapel Great Hall
Rae Armantrout has fifteen previous books including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Finalists; Conjure; Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award); Partly: New and Selected Poems; Itself; Just Saying; and Money Shot. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Scribner's Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as, Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Scientific American, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Yuri Herrera and Lisa Dillman
Dec. 5, 2024, 6 p.m.
Old Chapel Great Hall
Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of three novels, including Signs Preceding the End of the World, as well as the collection Ten Planets, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. His first novel Trabajos del reino (in English: Kingdom Cons) won the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven 2003 and received the “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008. His second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) was a finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His third novel is La transmigración de los cuerpos (Transmigration of Bodies). All of these novels have been translated into English by Lisa Dillman for British publisher And Other Stories. In 2016, he and Dillman shared the Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World. Herrera teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Lisa Dillman has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over Madrid, Such Small Hands and The Right Intention by Andrés Barba and Yuri Herrera’s novels. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Visiting Writers Series is an annual event by the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers bringing literary artists from around the world to western Massachusetts with free and public programming. The voice of the writer brings ideas and rhythms of language to life, inspiring listeners through intellectual engagement, imagination, and possibility. By showcasing a variety of aesthetics, perspectives, genres, forms, and performance styles the series provides audience members with unique opportunities to experience contemporary literary art.