Juniper Summer Writing Institute Reading Series Returns June 20-23

The Juniper Summer Writing Institute will host readings of prose and poetry at UMass Amherst June 20-23. Readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are open to the public via livestream only.

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The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, in association with the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, gathers a community of writers to explore the creative process and develop new approaches to the craft of writing. The program consists of one week of intensive writing workshops, craft sessions, Q&As, readings and manuscript consultation in the Connecticut River Valley. This year Juniper is partnering with Amherst Books to make participants’ books available to purchase.

Monday, June 20: Franny Choi & Toni Jensen

Franny Choi is the author of several books, including “Soft Science” (Alice James Books, 2019), “Floating, Brilliant, Gone” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and a chapbook, “Death by Sex Machine” (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Toni Jensen is the author of “Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land” (Ballantine 2020), a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen’s essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone.

Tuesday, June 21: Noy Holland & Evie Shockley

Noy Holland received the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books include “I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories,” the novel “Bird” and three collections of short fiction – “Swim for the Little One First,” “What Begins with Bird” and “The Spectacle of the Body.” Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar whose most recent poetry collections are “the new black” (Wesleyan, 2011) and “semiautomatic” (Wesleyan, 2017). Both books won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation.

Thursday, June 23: Gina Apostol & Arda Collins

Gina Apostol won the 2022 Rome Prize in Literature to write her next novel, “The Treatment of Paz,” on perils of womanhood among Filipino radicals in 1880s Europe. Another novel centering women and revolution, “La Tercera,” will be released by Soho Press in January 2023. Arda Collins is the author of “Star Lake” (The Song Cave, 2022) and “It Is Daylight” (2009), which was awarded the Yales Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, jubilat and elsewhere.

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 J.E. and Marjorie B. Pittman Foundation and individual contributors.

More information about the reading series, and registration for the readings’ Zoom sessions, can be found at the Juniper Institute website.