NEWS RELEASE                     

For Immediate Release 

 

Contact:  

  Santee Frazier, Director, Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program 

505.424.2365, or  sfrazier@iaia.edu

  Eric Davis, Marketing & Communications Director

                505.424.2351, or eric.davis@iaia.edu 

 


Visiting Writers
Layli Long Soldier, Abigail Chabitnoy, E.C. Osondu
Join The IAIA Summer Readers Gathering:  
July 20-27, 2019

Public Invited to Free Nightly Readings  by 
Visiting Writers  and MFA Mentors 
on the IAIA campus
 

SANTA FE, NM - June 27, 2019

The Institute of American Indian Arts' (IAIA) Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program presents The 2019 Summer Readers Gathering -- July 20-27, 2019. Readings will take place each night beginning at 6:00 pm in the Auditorium in the Library and Technology Center (LTC) on the IAIA campus -- located at 83 Avan Nu Po Road, minutes from the intersection of Rodeo Road and Richards Avenue, on the south side of Santa Fe.  For directions and a map of the campus, please visit iaia.edu/about/visit.  All readings are free and open to the public.

Participating in the gathering this year are noted writers Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Abigail Chabitnoy (Unangan/Sugpiaq), and E.C. Onsondu --  as well as IAIA MFA mentors Ramona Ausubel Esther Belin   (Diné), Marie-Helene BertinoSherwin Bitsui (Diné), Cherie Dimaline (Métis), Jennifer Elise Foerster (Muscogee [Creek] Nation of Oklahoma), Santee Frazier (Cherokee), Geoff Harris, Pam Houston, Toni Jensen (Métis), Kristiana Kahakauwila, (Native Hawaiian/German/Norwegian), Chip Livingston (Creek), Derek PalacioBrooke Swaney Pepion (Blackfeet Tribal Member & Salish Descendent),  and Ken White

MFA Program Director  Santee Frazier  (Cherokee), says of this year's Summer Readers Gathering: " The 2019 IAIA MFACW brings together a diverse range of voices working in the literary arts. We welcome readings by new mentors Esther Belin (Diné) and Brooke Swaney Pepion (Blackfeet). Featured writers include emerging poet Abby Chabitnoy (Unangan/Sugpiaq), Nigerian fiction writer E.C. Osondu, and renowned poet and visual artist Layli Long Soldier (Lakota). This year, with the appointment of Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) as US Poet Laureate, we celebrate the integral contributions of Indigenous Women to World Literature."

Readers Gathering Schedule
 
Saturday, July 20: 
Esther Belin  
Derek Palacio  
Marie-Helene Bertino  

Sunday, July 21:   
Ramona Ausubel  
Geoff Harris  
Sherwin Bitsui  

Monday, July 22: 
Abigail Chabitnoy
Ken White  

Tuesday, July 23:   
Jennifer Elise Foerster  
Brooke Swaney Pepion
Toni Jensen

Thursday, July 25:
Santee Frazier  
E.C. Osondu  

Friday, July 26:
Cherie Dimaline  
Layli Long Soldier  

Saturday, January 12:
Pam Houston  
Chip Livingston  
Kristiana Kahakauwila  

                       

VISITING WRITERS



Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a poet, writer, and artist currently teaching in  Randolph College's MFA program. She has recently been named Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at IAIA and will join the faculty in the fall of 2019. Her book of poems  WHEREAS, published by Graywolf Press in 2017, received the  PEN Jean Stein Award and  National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. The book was a  finalist for the  2017 National Book Award . Layli is the recipient of a  Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a  National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation. Her work has been featured on NPR's  On Being and PBS's  NewsHour.
 
Her poems and critical work appear in Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Reader, Kenyon Review, New York Times, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, The Denver Quarterly, and  Brooklyn Rail, among others. In 2010 Q Ave Press published the chapbook  Chromosomory, and in 2013 she participated in the art exhibit Pte Oyate at the Red Cloud Indian School.
 
Layli is a contributing editor at  Drunken Boat and the poetry editor for  Kore Press, a literary press that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by women. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the  Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with Honors from  Bard College.



Abigail Chabitnoy

Abigail Chabitnoy  earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in  Hayden's Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House,Gulf Coast, LitHub,  and   Red Inkamong others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her debut poetry collection,   How to Dress a Fishwas recently released from Wesleyan University Press.  



E.C. Onsondu

E.C. Onsondu  was born in Nigeria. He is a winner of the Caine prize also known as the African Booker and a Pushcart prize and a Pushcart Special Mention. The author of the book of stories Voice of America and the novel This House is Not for Sale, his fiction has been published in at least two dozen journals and has been translated into more than half a dozen languages including Japanese, Icelandic, French, Italian etc
He's an Associate Professor of English at Providence College and has been a Visiting Professor at UT Austin.   His current projects are a book of stories- Alien Stories- stories from the collection have been published in Zzyzyva, Guernica, Threepenny Review, etc.  He is also a Contributing Editor to the literary journal AGNI.




MFA PROGRAM DIRECTOR


Santee Frazier

Santee Frazier  is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts  and an MFA from Syracuse University . He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in  American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares,  and other literary journals. His first collection of poetry,  Dark Thirty,  was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.



MENTORS



Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel is the author of two novels and two story collections. Her most recent book,  Awayland , was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a Finalist for the California Book Award, Colorado Book Award and long-listed for the Story Prize. She is also the author of  Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, No One is Here Except All of Us,  and  A Guide to Being Born . She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has appeared in  The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares  and many other journals. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and joins the faculty at Colorado State University in the fall of 2019.




Esther Belin


Esther Belin (Diné) is a multimedia artist and writer. She is the author of two collections of poetry,  From the Belly of My Beauty  (1999), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and  Cartography  (2017). She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Durango, Colorado.




Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novel  2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas and the story collection  Safe as Houses -- and was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Story Prize, and has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. She teaches at NYU, The New School, and Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM -- and lives in Brooklyn, where she was the Associate Editor for One Story and Catapult. Her third book,  Parakeet, is forthcoming from FSG in Spring 2020. 




Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of  Shapeshift  (University of Arizona Press, 2003),  Flood Song  (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and  Dissolve  (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. In addition to teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he joins the faculty at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 2019.




Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis Community) is the author of the novels  Red Rooms, The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy, and the collection of short stories A Gentle Habit. Her latest work, a dystopian YA novel,  The Marrow Thieves, was released by Cormorant Books in 2017 and has since won the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature, the Burt Award for First Nations Metis and Inuit Literature, and the prestigious Kirkus Prize for Young People.The book has been shortlisted for 2018 CBC Canada Reads, the White Pine Award, the Trillium Award and has landed on numerous 'Best of' lists for 2017 including  National Public Radio , New York Public Library, American Indians in Children's Literature and the School Library Journal. It was 2018's #1 bestselling Canadian book and is being adapted for television.

In addition to writing, Cherie has edited numerous publications including Spirit, FNH and Muskrat magazines. She was named the 2014 Emerging Artist of the Year-Ontario Premier's Award, and was named the first Writer in Residence-Aboriginal Literature for the Toronto Public Library. Cherie also held the position of Writer in Residence for First Nations House at the University of Toronto and faculty for the Humber College Editing Indigenous Manuscripts program and the Humber School for Writers. She sits on numerous literary and arts boards and councils and continues to advocate for Indigenous literature and writers globally, work which has taken her from the Banff, Alberta to Gujurat, India. 

Cherie works closely with Elder storytellers in the community to carry forward protocols, histories and the stories themselves. She  currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she coordinates the annual Indigenous Writers' Gathering and is building a national Indigenous literary organization. Her next work of literary fiction,  Empire of Wild , will be published with Random House Canada and William Morrow in the US, Fall 2019. Her next YA book is forthcoming in Spring 2020 with Penguin Books.




Jennifer Elise Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts and her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. In addition to teaching in the IAIA MFA program, which she served for one year as Interim Director, Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also co-directs, with the poet, Joy Harjo, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma, and is a Project Director with the non-profit organization InnerCHANGE WORKS. She is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. Foerster is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent, is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, and lives in San Francisco.




Geoff Harris

Before becoming a professional TV writer and teacher, Geoff Harris worked as Vice-President of Story and Writer Development at NBC, where he oversaw the Story Department and developed primetime TV shows in all formats, from comedies and dramas to movies and mini-series. In addition, he discovered and placed talented new writers from around the U.S. As a writer, Geoff creates and develops TV shows and has pitched and sold his series to various production companies and networks. He also uses his storytelling talent and Industry experience to mentor the next generation of writers. He runs intensive, story-incubation labs that prepare diverse writers for the rigors of working on a TV series. Under his tutelage, more than 40 writers have been staffed on series across all platforms-network, cable, premium cable, and streaming. Geoff holds two Master's degrees, one from Columbia University and the other from University of Notre Dame, and an undergraduate degree from St. John's College.




Pam Houston

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir,  Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Countryas well as two novels,  Contents May Have Shifted  and  Sight Hound;  two collections of short stories,  Cowboys Are My Weakness  and  Waltzing the Cat;  and a collection of essays,  A Little More About Me , all published by W.W. Norton.  Her stories have been selected for volumes of  The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century  among other anthologies.  She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and several teaching awards.  She teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, which puts on between seven and ten writers gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California and Chamonix, France. 

Pam lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she raises horses, donkeys, Icelandic Sheep, and Irish Wolfhounds. She learned everything she knows about being a teacher and much about what she knows about being a human being from her years at Denison, and from the professors in the English department in particular.  Her father always said, "Pam, one of these days you are going to realize you spend your whole life lying in the gutter with somebody's foot on your neck."  And then she went to Dension and her professors said, "You can do anything you want with your life as long as you work hard and keep the greater good in mind."  Needless to say it was a turning point, and so far the foot on her neck has never materialized.




Toni Jensen

Toni Jensen (Métis),  is the author of a short story collection,  From the Hilltop , and a memoir-in-essays about gun violence,  Carry , forthcoming from Ballantine. She is the recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Gary Wilson Short Fiction Award. Her essays and stories have been published in journals such as  Orion, Catapult , and  Ecotone . She teaches in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and in the low residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.



Kristiana Kahakauwila

Kristiana Kahakauwila is a  hapa  writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German, and Norwegian descent. Her first book,  This is Paradise: Stories  (Hogarth, 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai`i. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Michigan. A former Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Kristiana currently lives in Bellingham, WA, where she is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University. Recent work has appeared in  RED INK, Kartika Review, Mistake House Magazine , and  GEO Magazine . She is currently at work on a historical novel set on the island of Maui.



Chip Livingston

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of four books: two collections of poetry,  Crow-Blue, Crow-Black  (2012) and  Museum of False Starts  (2010); a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction,  Naming Ceremony  (2014); and a novel,  Owls Don't Have to Mean Death  (2017). His writing has received awards from Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip's writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, Cincinnati Review,  and on the Academy of American Poets' and Poetry Foundation's websites. He has taught at the University of Colorado, University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Regis University.



Derek Palacio

Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. His short story Sugarcane  appeared in  The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 , and his novella,  How to Shake the Other Man , was published by Nouvella Books. His debut novel,  The Mortifications , was published in 2016 by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI.



Brooke Swaney Pepion

Brooke Swaney Pepion (Blackfeet Tribal Member & Salish Descendent) is a 2003 Stanford graduate. She went on to obtain her MFA from NYU.  A 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, a 2014 Sundance Native Lab Fellow and a Time Warner Fellow, her work has screened at Sundance, ImagineNative, the Autry and the Museum of Modern Art amongst others.  She is versed in both short and long-form content creation.



Ken White

Ken White is a poet and screenwriter. He co-wrote and and co-produced the feature film  Winter in the Blood;  co-directed and co-wrote the short film  Universal VIP;  as well as directed and co-wrote the short film  The Conservationist , currently in development as a feature, which White will direct. He has written or co-written ten feature scripts, including  Blight and The Wereman The Sorrows , and  Cullen's Hound , as well as new scripts,  The Orpheum Circuit, The Conservationist , and a television pilot LIT , with James Meetze. White is the author of three books of poetry,  Eidolon, The Getty Fiend , as well as  Middlemost Constantine  (forthcoming from Spork ). His work has appeared in  The Boston Review, The Tusculum Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Versal, Spork, Horsethief , and  Poets.org , among others. White teaches screenwriting in the IAIA Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program and joins the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Omaha in the fall of 2019.


To schedule an interview with  Santee Frazier or any of the writers, please contact him at 505.424.2365, or sfrazier@iaia.edu. 
  
Support for these events is provided by the Lannan Foundation and New Mexico Arts.

Partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers Tax.
About IAIA -- For over 50 years, the Institute of American Indian Arts has played a key role in the direction and shape of Native expression. With an internationally acclaimed college, museum, and tribal support resource through our Land Grant Programs, IAIA is dedicated to the study and advancement of Native arts and cultures -- and committed to student achievement and the preservation and progress of their communities.  Learn more about IAIA and our mission at  www.iaia.edu.


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