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Mark your calendars! invites you to a semester of free public in-person and live-streamed readings, Q&As, book signings, and museum exhibits.

Zoe Hana Mikuta | YA Fiction

Zoe Hana Mikuta is a Korean-American writer currently attending the University of Washington in Seattle where she is majoring in English with a creative writing focus and minoring in History of Religion. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where she developed a deep love of Muay Thai kickboxing and nurtured a slow and steady infatuation for fictional worlds. She enjoys writing about deteriorating worlds inhabited by characters with bad tempers, skewed morals, and big hearts. Her YA wlw sci-fi debut Gearbreakers was published by Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan in June 2021. An untitled sequel will follow in 2022.

Wednesday, September 22, 2021  |  6:30 P.M.

Haki R. Madhubuti | Poetry

Haki R. Madhubuti is an award-winning poet, one of the architects of the Black Arts Movement, an essayist, educator, founder and publisher (Emeritus) of Third World Press (1967) and Third World Press Foundation. He is the author/editor of over thirty-six books of poetry and nonfiction including Don’t Cry, ScreamÌý(1969),ÌýRun Toward Fear: New Poems and a Poet’s HandbookÌý(2004),ÌýYellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s LifeÌý(2006);ÌýLiberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1967-2009Ìý(2009),ÌýHonoring genius, Gwendolyn Brooks: The narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice (2011); and the best-selling Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (1991). A long-time community activist and institution builder, Madhubuti is a co-founder of the Institute of Positive Education and its three schools in Chicago. He retired in 2011 after a forty-two-year distinguished teaching career that included Cornell University, Howard University, Chicago State University where he was appointed its first University Distinguished Professor and was the founding Director of its MFA Program in Creative Writing, and DePaul University, where he served as the last Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor. Madhubuti’s most recent books are,ÌýTaking Bullets: Terrorism and Black Life in Twenty-First Century America (2016), co-editor of Not Our President: New Directions From the Pushed Out, the Others, and the Clear Majority in Trump’s Stolen America (2017) and Taught By Women: Poems As Resistance Language New And SelectedÌý(2020).

Tuesday, October 5, 2021  |  6:00 P.M.

Brian Blanchfield | Prose

Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, including Proxies: Essays Near KnowingÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýA Several World, which received, respectively, a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and the 2014 Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award.  His recent work appears in The Oxford American,ÌýGrand,ÌýTin House,ÌýA Public Space,ÌýThe Map Is Not the Territory,ÌýNorthwest Review,ÌýTextual Practice, and Chicago Review.  A finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir and the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation and the Idaho Council for the Arts, Blanchfield teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and directs the MFA writing program at the University of Idaho.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021  |  5:30 P.M.