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Welcome to Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. 

Where impossible isn’t.

Since 1925, we’ve helped our students discover what it takes to be undaunted. Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Athenians at the Mount demonstrate this every day. Because for women who are unstoppable, everything is possible.

Now it’s your turn.

Visiting Writers and Artists Reading Series to feature award-winning authors

Mount Saint Mary’s MFA in Creative Writing program will host its first Visiting Writers and Artists Reading Series, starting Dec. 3 with award-winning fiction writer Ottessa Moshfegh.

Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her short stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.

 The Dec. 3 event will start at 6:30 p.m. All readings will be held in the J. Thomas McCarthy Library on the Doheny Campus.

 “We hope the Reading Series enriches the strong literary culture that is already present on campus. The writers chosen exemplify the sort of authors we hope our graduates in the MFA program aspire to become: diversely talented, well-published, literary citizens,” said JoAnna Novak, assistant professor, MFA in creative writing.

 On Feb. 6 at 6:30 p.m., the series will feature Geoff Dyer, winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award for criticism for “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.” He is the author of four novels, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and The Ongoing Moment.

 Wendy C. Ortiz will be the featured speaker on April 2 and 3. She is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. Her work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Hazlitt, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, StoryQuarterly, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

 Morgan Parker will speak on April 20 at 3 p.m. She is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce. Her work has been widely published as well as anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Best American Poetry 2016. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Cave Canem graduate fellow, she is an editor at Little A and Day One. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.

For more information, contact JoAnna Novak at jnovak@msmu.edu. You can also visit the MFA in Creative Writing Facebook page at www.facebook.com/msmucreativewriting.

Source: https://www.msmu.edu/