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The UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers has announced the Juniper Literary Festival 2024, Friday, April 5, and Saturday, April 6, on the UMass Amherst campus. This year’s festival is part of the yearlong celebration of the MFA’s 60^th anniversary. The celebration honors the program’s dynamic alumni and the theme of the writer in community.

All events are free and open to the public.

“We are excited to invite our wider community to celebrate with us for this sixtieth anniversary,” says MFA Program Director Edie Meidav. “Our institution thrives on such strong tradition and innovation, and this program is poised at a great moment—deep exploration in our past and future, while our community plays an important role. This special jubilee year offers so many bridging events, and we hope all the vital cultural conversation happening in our halls will connect with a community we deeply appreciate.”

The Juniper Festival is produced by the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. The festival is also supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the UMass Chancellor’s Office, UMass English Department, UMass Arts Council, Emily Dickinson Museum and UMass Art Department.

For more information and scheduling details, visit https://www.umass.edu/english/events/juniper-literary-festival-2024 or contact Ryan Mihaly at rmihaly@umass.edu.
 

***Please note that the locations for the events have changed, effective April 1. The new locations are indicated below.***

Full Schedule

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

Susan Straight’s 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 61^st 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.

Publishing in Today’s Market
Anjali Singh
Friday, April 5 - 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
Hannah Brooks-Motl and Bianca Stone
Friday, April 5 - 6 p.m.
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

Hannah Brooks-Motl ’13MFA is the author of the poetry collections “The New Years,” “M”, and “Earth.”  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.” 

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
Friday, April 5 - 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. The community is invited to join each reading, which feature the talents of a graduate prose writer and poet.

Writer & Editor Chat
Sarah Ghazal Ali and Carey Salerno of Alice James Books
Saturday, April 6 - 3:30 p.m.
Herter Hall, 231

Sarah Ghazal Ali ’21MFA is the author of “Theophanies” (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar and winner of The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Stadler Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch. She has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow, and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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
Sarah Ghazal Ali ’21MFA, Eric Baus ’05MFA, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu ’23MFA, and Susan Straight ’84MFA
Saturday, April 6 - 6 p.m.
Herter Hall, 231

Sarah Ghazal Ali ’21MFA is the author of “Theophanies” (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar and winner of The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Stadler Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch. She has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow, and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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.

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 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.