Spring 2022 Visiting Writers Series
Image
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint: A Reading and Conversation

Thursday, February 17, 2022
7:30-8:30 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, second floor) and via Zoom
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names for Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation.” ―Janice Lee, author of Damnation and The Sky Isn’t Blue
Myint is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College.
Image
Philip Metres: A Reading and Conversation

Monday, March 7, 2022
7:30-8:30 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, second floor) and via Zoom
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
“This is a breathtaking collection, unrivaled in scope or execution, fit to dwell among the great collections of our time… [W]hat sets Shrapnel Maps apart from many of its contemporaries is its insistence on reaching for the light, in reaching for unity, in reaching for new definitions of peace and new definitions of a sustainable joy.” —The Cleveland Review of Books
Image
Tiana Clark: A Reading and Conversation

Thursday, March 31, 2022
7:30-8:30 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, second floor)
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
“Critiquing the commodification of black pain while also acknowledging and revealing your hurt as a black person is tricky as hell. It is dangerous. And that is precisely what Tiana Clark does in these beautiful, vulnerable, honest poems. It is a kind of tenderness, and a kind of belief. A reaching toward. It is a kind of care.” —Ross Gay
The Kenyon Review described Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood as a book that “unearths what many have hoped to obscure and demands recognition for the fact that the echoes of slavery, segregation, and racism are not only in existence, but in fact, maintain our country’s personal and political realities today.” That book won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Clark’s first book, Equilibrium, was selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.
Clark is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Image
David Mills: A Reading and Conversation

Wednesday, April 6, 2022
7:30-8:30 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
“In a deft, linked series of lyric poems, the voices of the dead of New York’s Negro Burial Ground emerge to tell the stories of their lives as enslaved people. Boneyarn’s evocative poems bring a reader to feel history’s forgotten stories through Mills’s rich imagination. A suite of poems lauds early African-American poets Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. These poems are a stirring document: a gorgeous, heart wrenching read.” —Connie Voisine
The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced Mr. Mills’ play The Serpent and the Dove. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.
https://writers.com/david-mills
Image
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi: A Reading and Conversation

Wednesday, April 20, 2022
7:30-8:30 pm
CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.” —The New York Times Book Review of Call Me Zebra
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the award-winning author of the novel Call Me Zebra, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award, was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, a Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller and named a Best Book by over twenty publications. It is being translated into Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Romanian and was published in the UK by Alma Books, a division of Bloomsbury.
She received a Whiting Award in 2015, and her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fellowship from Art OMI. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. She currently teaches in the MFA program at University of Notre Dame and lives in Chicago.
www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com
The Stranger by Saleh Al Malhi
The Common Spring Launch Party
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
5:00 pm
Via Zoom
Amherst College's award-winning literary magazine The Common celebrates the release of Issue 23 with authors from around the world.
We welcome fiction writer Fernando Flores, poet Tina Cane, Palestinian writer Eyad Barghuthy, and Arabic translator Nashwa Gowanlock for brief readings and conversation about place, culture, and translation, hosted by the magazine's editor in chief Jennifer Acker.