2025 Juniper Summer Writing Institute- Reading Series

DATE: June 6, 2023 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Announcing the Juniper Summer Writing Institute 2023 Reading Series, June 15-20 Amherst, MA: The Juniper Summer Writing Institute is thrilled to reopen its reading series to the public, June 15-20 at the Old Chapel on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. Readings begin at 7:30pm and will be followed by a Q&A. This week we are excited to welcome writers from all places & homes, backgrounds & experience, to work with an acclaimed line-up of faculty to deepen and embolden their work while building a lasting artistic community. We would like to invite the public to join us in this creative and inventive week by attending the evening reading series where our esteemed guest writers will not only share their work live, but also speak to what gets truly nurtured in the writer's life through dialogue with other guest writers and engagement with audience questions. The Reading Series is accessible, and open to the public. There is no cost for admission, but we do invite attendees from the public to make a donation to our scholarship fund. The suggested amount is $5-$20, but any amount helps keep our literary programming accessible for all. Books by the readers will be for sale through Amherst Books, and the readers will be available to sign their work after the event. The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, in association with the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers, brings together writers of all levels to work closely with renowned poets and writers. Workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction are the heart of the program that includes craft sessions and manuscript consultation with guest writers. Sunday, June 15, 2025: Tiana Clark and T Kira Māhealani Madden Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is currently working on her next two books, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival; and Scorched Earth, a poetry collection, tracing the complexities of relationship beginnings and endings, loneliness, desire, and joy, which sold to Jenny Xu at Atria. T Kira Māhealani Madden is a diasporic Kanaka 'ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the Founding Editor of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, NYSCA/NYFA, and Yaddo. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner, HarperCollins. Winner of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award, she teaches at Mount Holyoke College, and served as the 2024 Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Monday, June 16, 2025: Jessica Anthony and Sam Sax Jessica Anthony is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel THE MOST (Little, Brown & Co.), which was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Fiction. Her novel ENTER THE AARDVARK (Little, Brown & Co.) was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Anthony's novels have been published in over a dozen countries, and are featured in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Book Review as an Editors' Choice. Anthony has received literary fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Bridge Guard Foundation (Slovakia), the Maine Arts Commission, and she recently spent a month in residence at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. Anthony's story "The Death of Mustango Salvaje," originally published by McSweeney's, is currently in development with A24 for a limited TV series, filmed in Spain. She lives in Maine. Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. Their most recent book is the debut novel, Yr Dead (McSweeney's, 2024), longlisted for a National Book Award in Fiction, and called "profoundly original" by Kirkus Review in a starred review. Their most recent book of poems is Pig (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry. They're the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. A two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, they have poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, and MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. Tuesday, June 17, 2025: Abby Chabitnoy, Annie Liontas, and Maggie Millner Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Hayden's Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-residency MFA program and is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. Abigail is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. Find her at salmonfisherpoet.com . Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the crip-queer memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery (Scribner, 2024), which was featured on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and selected as SELF Magazine's Book of the Month. Their debut novel, Let Me Explain You (Scribner, 2015), was selected as New York Times Editors Choice in 2015. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared or will appear in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lithub, The Believer, American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Syracuse University's MFA program, Annie is an Associate Professor of writing at George Washington University and serves as faculty at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Annie has volunteered as a mentor for Pen City's incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They