Juniper Summer Writing Institute Reading Series Returns June 12

The Juniper Summer Writing Institute Reading Series returns to the UMass Amherst campus June 12-15, with readings at the Old Chapel beginning at 6:30 p.m. each evening.

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The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, in association with the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers, brings together writers of all levels to work closely with renowned poets and writers. Workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction are the heart of the program that includes craft sessions and manuscript consultation with guest writers.

“With a stellar faculty lineup and over 90 dedicated workshop participants who are ready to take their work to the next level, we are looking at an electric week full of creative possibilities,” says Betsy Wheeler, Juniper’s director, adding that the Reading Series provides a peek inside the writers’ lives. “Our acclaimed guest writers will not only share their work, but also give us a behind-the-scenes view into how they create the arresting work that they do.”

The readings, which are followed by Q&A sessions, are accessible and open to the public. There is no cost for admission, but attendees are invited to make small donations to the program’s scholarship fund, which Wheeler notes, keeps the literary programming accessible for all. Books by the readers will be for sale through Amherst Books, and the readers will be available to sign their works after the event.

Monday, June 12: Diana Khoi Nguyen and Leni Zumas

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of “Ghost Of” (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. In Spring 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at Brown University, where she curated an exhibit at the Providence Public Library, “Would That.” A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective She Who Has No Master(s), she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Leni Zumas was a finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her bestselling novel “Red Clocks” won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Entropy and the New York Public Library. Vulture called it one of the 100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far.

Zumas is also the author of “Farewell Navigator: Stories” (2008) and the novel “The Listeners” (2012). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Guernica, The Cut, Tin House and elsewhere. She has received grants and fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Zumas lives in Oregon and teaches in the creative writing program at Portland State University.

Tuesday, June 13: Mahogany L. Browne and CAConrad

Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center’s Next 50 and Wesleyan’s 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, is executive Ddrector of JustMedia, artistic director of Urban Word, and a writer, playwright, organizer and educator. Browne has received fellowships from Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: "Vinyl Moon," "Chlorine Sky," "Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice," "Woke Baby," and "Black Girl Magic." Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne’s latest poetry collection "Chrome Valley" is a promissory note to survival and available from Norton in spring 2023. As she readies for her stage debut of Chlorine Sky at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, she drinks coffee while living in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. As a young poet, CA lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis, as documented in the essay, “SIN BUG: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia.” CA exhibits their poems as art objects in places such as Futura Gallery in Prague, Robert Grunenberg Gallery in Berlin, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City, Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, and as part of the 2021 Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2023 CA will celebrate the 30th anniversary of writing “The Book of Frank” (Wave Books, 2010), which is now available in 9 different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award and a Believer Magazine Book Award. Their play “The Obituary Show” was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. They currently live in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and taught in the MFA creative writing program at UMass Amherst from fall 2022 to spring 2023. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

Wednesday, June 14: Cynthia Arrieu-King and Tiphanie Yanique

Cynthia Arrieu-King is a professor of creative writing at Stockton University and a former Kundiman fellow. Her poetry books include “People are Tiny in Paintings of China” (Octopus Books 2010), “Manifest,” winner of the Gatewood Prize chosen by Harryette Mullen (Switchback Books 2013), “Futureless Languages” (Radiator Press 2018) and its sequel “Continuity” (Octopus Books 2021). Her experimental prose memoir “The Betweens” (Noemi 2021) examines the difference between how we see others and how and who they really are. She’s working on a collection of short stories and a novel on caregiving and post-apocalyptic utopias.

Tiphanie Yanique is that rare writer who has received critical acclaim and awards in three literary genres: poetry, the novel and short stories.  She is also an outspoken activist on behalf of the Caribbean Diaspora, having appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and published a passionate op-ed in The New York Times on the U.S. response to hurricanes in the Caribbean.

Her second novel, “Monster in the Middle,” was published by Riverhead Books in October 2021 to wide acclaim. Vulture praised her as “one of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation.” Her poetry collection, “Wife” (Peepal Tree Press UK, 2015), won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Her debut novel, “Land of Love and Drowning” (Riverhead Books, 2014), won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, among other honors. Her debut collection of stories, “How to Escape from a Leper Colony,” (Graywolf Press, 2010) was a 2010 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She has additionally been awarded the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, O Magazine and other outlets.

Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.

Thursday, June 15: Santee Frazier and Jeff Parker

A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Santee Frazier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, “Dark Thirty” (2009), was published by the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks series. Frazier’s honors include a Fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship, 2011 School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence and the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation literature fellow. His second collection of poems, “Aurum,” was released in 2019 by The University of Arizona Press. He served as director of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing and as visiting faculty with the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. He is currently serving as visiting assistant professor at Clemson University.

Jeff Parker is the author of the nonfiction book “Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal” (Harper Collins), the novel “Ovenman” (Tin House), and the short story collection The “Taste of Penny” (Dzanc). With Pasha Malla, he co-assembled the book of found sports poetry “Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion” (Featherproof), and with Annie Liontas he edited “A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors” (UMass Press). His short fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus and many others. With Mikhail Iossel he co-edited two volumes of contemporary Russian prose in translation, “Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia” (Tin House) and “Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States” (Dalkey Archive). He also co-translated the novel “Sankya,” by Zakhar Prilepin, from Russian. He has taught at Eastern Michigan University, the University of Toronto, the Russian State University for the Humanities and the University of Tampa, and he currently teaches in the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst.  He is the cofounder and director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Juniper Summer Writing Institute is supported, in part, by the UMass Amherst Department of English and College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Amherst Books, Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, The Charles Hayden Foundation, The Valley Advocate, The J.E. and Marjorie B. Pittman Foundation, institutional partners who support their students to attend the conference and individual contributors.

More information about the Juniper Summer Writing Institute Reading Series can be found at https://juniperinstitute.umasscreate.net/reading-series/.