Reading Series | MFA in Creative Arts

Join us for our MFA in Creative Writing Reading Series at The Bookery in Manchester, NH! January 3-6
To learn more about our MFA in Creative Writing, please click here.
Tuesday, January 3
6:00 PM | The Bookery, Manchester| David Ryan and Allison Titus
David Ryan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the O. Henry Prize anthology, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Fence, Copper Nickel, New England Review, Conjunctions, Bomb, Tin House, Esquire, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He’s the author of the story collection, Animals in Motion and a recent recipient of an Artistic Excellence fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
Allison Titus is the author of the poetry collections HIGH LONESOME (forthcoming 2023), The True Book of Animal Homes, and Sum of Every Lost Ship; the novel The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing To Do With Fire; and several chapbooks, including Sob Story, winner of the Barrelhouse Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology The New Sent(i)ence, a collection of poems that center the non-human animal’s consciousness, agency and creaturehood, and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Richmond, VA, where she works as a proofreader for an advertising agency.
Wednesday, January 4
6:00 PM | The Bookery, Manchester | Anaïs Duplan and Tara Ison
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020); a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016); and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College.
His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2021. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago; Boston; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Reykjavík, Iceland. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.
Tara Ison is the author of three novels: A Child out of Alcatraz, The List, and Rockaway; the essay collection Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies; and the short story collection Ball. Her work has appeared in Tin House, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Salon, Black Clock, O, the Oprah Magazine, Electric Lit, and several anthologies. She is the recipient of multiple Yaddo fellowships, the PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction, and two NEA fellowships. She is also the co-writer of the cult classic movie Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ison is a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Thursday, January 5
6:00 PM | The Bookery, Manchester | Andrew Morgan and Anna Qu
Andrew Morgan is a poet and fiction writer who has been teaching at New England College for the last 15 years. He has been the recipient of a Slovenian Writer’s Association Fellowship which sponsored a month long writing residency in the country’s capital city of Ljubljana and his recent work can be found in magazines such as Conduit, Stride, Fairy Tale Review, Pleiades, Divine Magnet, Peripheries, Post Road, and New World Writing. His first book, Month of Big Hands was published by Natural History Press in 2013. Morgan teaches in both the undergraduate as well as graduate creative writing programs and currently serves as Interim Dean of Humanities.
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.
Friday, January 6
6:00 PM | The Bookery, Manchester| Chen Chen and Jennifer Militello
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. He has also authored five chapbooks, most recently Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His work appears in many publications, including three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
Jennifer Militello is the author of the poetry collection The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021) and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019),winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, as well as four previous collections of poetry, including A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), called “positively bewitching” by Publishers Weekly, and Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the best books of 2013 by Best American Poetry. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and Tin House.