MFA in Creative Writing | Winter 2026 Reading Series
New England College’s MFA in Creative Writing program hosts the 2026 Winter Reading Series, featuring readings by the program’s highly talented writers. This event is free and open to the public.
Dates: Tuesday, January 6–Friday, January 9
Time: 7:30 p.m. for all sessions
Location: Varies by session
Tuesday, January 6 | John Lyons Center
Andrew Morgan is a professor, poet, editor, and volunteer whose work can be found in magazines such as Conduit, Verse, Slope, Stride, Fairy Tale Review, New World Writing, Post Road, Pleiades (as part of a “Younger American Poets” feature) and is the recipient of a Slovenian Writer’s Association Fellowship, which sponsored a month-long writing residency in the country’s capital city of Ljubljana. Currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New England College, his first book, Month of Big Hands, was published by Natural History Press in 2013.
Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and nomad currently based out of San Diego, California. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and short fiction publications in Fireside Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and more. He is the author of the young adult Fantasy novel DAUGHTERS OF ODUMA and the fantasy novellas THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO and THE TRUTH OF THE ALEKE. When he’s not writing, he’s traveling, training martial arts, or doing karaoke—with or without a backing track.
Wednesday, January 7 | Science Building Theatre
Aaron Chung is a first-generation Korean-American screenwriter, working in the film/television industry since 2018. They won the Academy Nicholl Fellowship in 2019. From there, he’s worked for companies like Skydance Animation and Netflix, and has staff writing credit on the Apple TV show, WONDLA.
Diandra Pendleton-Thompson is an Afro-Latina multi-hyphenate with over two decades of experience writing and performing for stage, screen, and alternative media. She’s worked on properties like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stranger Things, producing and writing for Audible, Netflix, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Plus.
Thursday, January 8 | John Lyons Center
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. His work appears in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The New York
Times, and other publications.
David Ryan is the author of Alligator: Stories and Animals in Motion: Stories. His work has appeared in the 0. Henry Prize anthology, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Georgia Review, New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Friday, January 9 | John Lyons Center
Tara Ison is the author of the novels A Child out of Alcatraz, The List, Rockaway, and At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf; the
story collection Ball; and the essay collection Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies.
Anna Qu is a Chinese-American writer. Her debut memoir, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor was published in 2021 by Catapult. Publisher’s Weekly hailed the memoir as “the arrival of a new voice,” and Time has called it a must-read for the summer. Her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches workshops at Catapult and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.
