Visiting Writers Series Presents Fall 2020 Lineup for Virtual Readings

The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s MFA for Poets and Writers has announced the Fall 2020 Virtual Visiting Writers Series featuring Cynthia Cruz, Gabriel Bump, Maaza Mengiste and Nathaniel Mackey.

Readings will start at 6 p.m. and will be followed by a question and answer session.

The 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. It is made possible by support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council and the English department.

All Fall 2020 readings are virtual, free and open to the public. To register for any of these readings, visit the UMass Amherst MFA's Visiting Writers Series page.

Thursday, Sept. 10

Cynthia Cruz is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Cruz is the author of six collections of poems: “Guidebooks for the Dead,” “Dregs,” “How the End Begins,” “Wunderkammer,” “The Glimmering Room” and “Ruin. She is also the editor of “Other Musics,” an anthology of contemporary Latina poetry. “Disquieting: Essays on Silence,” a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in the spring of 2019. “The Melancholia of Class,” her second collection of critical essays, an exploration of melancholia and the working class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021.

Thursday, Sept. 24

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2017. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

Thursday, Oct. 29

Maaza Mengiste is the author of the novels “Beneath the Lion's Gaze,” selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books; and “The Shadow King,” hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliant novel...compulsively readable." It was one of New York Times' Notable Books of 2019 and TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in fiction. Maaza is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Premio il ponte/Bridge Prize, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital and LiteraturHaus Zurich. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone and BBC, among other places.

Thursday, Nov. 12

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is “Blue Fasa,” an ongoing prose work. Other works include “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate” and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is “Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews.” He is the editor of the literary magazine “Hambone;” coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology “Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose;” and coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology “Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance.” His awards and honors include the National Book Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.