The Amherst College Center for Creative Writing holds a Fall and Spring Reading Series every year, with all events free and open to the public. For more information, please call 542-8200 or visit the Creative Writing Center’s Facebook page. If you would like to receive periodic announcements about our events and other events in the Valley, please email crnewman@amherst.edu. For listings of other local literary events, visit the Five-College Creative Writing Event Calendar.

We partner with Amherst Books, which sells books for our events online. Please support out local beloved bookstore!


Spring 2024 Creative Writing Series

Katherine Min’s The Fetishist with Kayla Min Andrews ‘08

Thursday, February 29th, 7:00 pm

CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101)

Katherine Min’s short stories appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Three-Penny Review, Glimmer Train, and others; she received an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, two New Hampshire State Council for the Arts Fellowships and a North Carolina State Arts Council Fellowship, and attended residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, Ucross, Hambidge, the Millay Colony, and Ledig House. Her debut novel, Secondhand World, was a runner-up for the PEN/Bingham Award in 2007. Her novel The Fetishist was published posthumously.

Kayla Min Andrews lives in New Orleans. She has a piece forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review and has been published in Cagibi for fiction, Halfway Down the Stairs for nonfiction, and Asymptote for literary translation. Her work was nominated for a Best of the Net 2020. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival’s Very Short Fiction Contest in 2023. Kayla assisted Putnam on the posthumous publication of her mother’s novel The Fetishist, including editing the manuscript. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph and is working on a novel.

The Fetishist Website

“Incandescent, astonishing, a miracle. I’m elated and deeply grateful this book exists.”

—R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries


Vivek Narayanan: A Reading and Conversation

Wednesday, March 6th, 7:00 pm

CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101)

Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems are After (New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022), Life and Times of Mr S, and Universal Beach. A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Poetry at Sangam, Granta, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books, Aroop and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan currently teaches poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he also sits on the boards of the Cheuse International Writers Center and Poetry Daily.

Vivek Narayanan’s website

“A collection of leaping, fierce poems that move in several directions, leaving the reader besieged and dazzled in equal measure”

—Tishani Doshi, Poetry Review


A Reading and Conversation with Diasporic Burmese American Writers

Tuesday, March 12th, 7:00 pm

CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101)

Maw Shein's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry
collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. 

Maw Shein Win’s website

Audrey T. Williams is a speculative literary artist who writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her writing is published in Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook, Space & Time magazine, and Lightspeed. She is a Program Coordinator for the Afrosurreal Writers Workshop of Oakland, Co-chair of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, and a board member of the Black Speculative Arts Movement’s Oakland chapter. Raised in coastal North Carolina, Audrey’s work is rooted in the culture of place and her heritage at the intersection of Southern Black America and South Asian diaspora.

Audrey T. Williams’s website

Kenneth Wong is a Burmese American author and a language instructor. His short stories, essays, and poetry translations have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle magazine, AGNI (Boston University), Eleven Eleven (California College of the Arts), The Irrawaddy, Myanmar Times, and more. He teaches beginning and intermediate Burmese at UC Berkeley.

Kenneth Wong on Instagram


Meghana Mysore: A Reading and Conversation

Wednesday, March 27th, 7:00 pm

CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101)

Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer. A 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow, her work appears in Pleiades, Apogee, Passages North, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, wildness, Boston Review, The Margins of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). A Tin House, Bread Loaf, and Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Scholar, she has also received recognition from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The de Groot Foundation, and The Carolyn Moore Writers’ Residency. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is working on a novel exploring loss, desire, and joy in three generations of a South Indian American family. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Amherst College.

Meghana Mysore’s website


Sheila Sundar: A Reading and Conversation

Wednesday, April 10th, 7:00 pm

CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101)

Sheila Sundar is the author of the novel Habitations. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Orleans with her family.

Sheila Sundar’s website

Habitations is a delightful novel, written with immediacy, warmth, and wry humor. Covering dramas both personal and universal, Sundar offers insightful reflections on the desire for arrival and the longing for return. This is a significant addition to migrant fiction.”

—HA JIN, author of National Book Award winner Waiting


The Common Spring Launch Party

Wednesday, April 24th, 7:00 pm

Reading Room in Frost Library

Join us for the launch of Issue 27 of The Common! Featuring essayist and AGNI editor Sven Birkerts, poet January Gill O'Neil, and fiction writer Jade Song. Wine and snacks provided.

Sven Birkerts is the author of a number of books of essay and memoir. His The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing will be published in October. Former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he co-edits the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst with his wife.

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press, 2024), Rewilding (CavanKerry Press, 2018), recognized by Mass Center for the Book as a notable poetry collection for 2018; Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She is an associate professor of English at Salem State University and is board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2022-2024). O’Neil lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Jade Song is a writer, art director, and artist in New York City. Her debut novel Chlorine was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins (US) and Footnote Press (UK) in 2023 and will be translated into Chinese and French. Chlorine was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, lauded as "visionary and disturbing," and listed as a must read book by Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, and other outlets. Say hi @jadessong and jadessong.com.


A woman sitting in a relaxed position under a tree

Previous Reading Series

Visit our past reading series pages, featuring authors including Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Danielle Vogel, Neema Avashia, Ling Ma and Mona Awad.