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 co-host the literary podcast LitFriends and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries.

Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.

 

Maggie was the 2020–'21 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–'20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–'18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where they received their MFA. They are also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center.

 

Wednesday, June 18, 2025: Shastri Akella, Dur e Aziz Amna, and Noor Hindi

 

Shastri Akella (he/they) is a queer migrant of color who is neurodivergent and comes from a working class background. Their debut novel, The Sea Elephants, was published in 2023 by Flatiron Books (USA) and Penguin (India). A queer bildungsroman set in 90s India, it was named a most anticipated debut by Good Morning America, Poets & Writers, and LGBTQ Reads, among others. They won the 2024 BLR Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and the 2024 William Faulkner Short Story Prize. Their story was selected for the 2024 Best American Short Stories. Their writing is/will be in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, LitHub, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, World Literature Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Vizag, they now live in East Lansing and teach creative writing at Michigan State University.

 

Dur e Aziz Amna is from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and now lives in Newark, USA. Her debut novel, American Fever, was published in 2023 and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the South Asia Book Award. Her work also appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, and won the 2019 Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.

 

Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is calling on you to join the global fight for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people. Anywhere and everywhere you are, you can disrupt, advocate, speak out and refuse in small and big ways. Revolution until freedom.

Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi.

 

Thursday, June 19th: NO READING, Observance of Juneteeth

 

Friday, June 20th: ‘Pemi Aguda, Safia Elhillo, and Jeff Parker

 

’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, One Story among others, and won O. Henry Prizes. Her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine. Her first book, Ghostroots (Norton, 2024), was longlisted for the National Book Awards in Fiction.

 

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of the books The January Children, Girls That Never Die, Home Is Not A Country, and Bright Red Fruit.

 

Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet.

Jeff Parker is the author of the nonfiction book Where Bears Roam the Streets:  A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc).  With Pasha Malla, he co-assembled the book of found sports poetry Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion (Featherproof), and with Annie Liontas he edited A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors (UMass Press).  His short fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and many others.  He currently teaches in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  He is the cofounder and Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, as well as a Creative Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

 

The Juniper Summer Writing Institute is supported, in part, by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of English, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Amherst Books, The Charles Hayden Foundation, The J.E. and Marjorie B. Pittman Foundation, Fiction Collective Two, institutional partners who support their students to attend the conference, and individual contributors.

 

Learn more at https://juniperinstitute.umasscreate.net/reading-series/
Photographs available on request. Email: juninst@umass.edu

Contact: Betsy Wheeler, Director

ejwheele@umass.edu, 413-545-5503

juninst@umass.edu, www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute