The upcoming MFA in Creative Writing Residency at AULA, which will run from June 14-23, will host an exciting roster of guest faculty and guest speakers.
Khadijah Queen, author of (most recently) the poetry collection featured in O Magazine, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On; and Aminah Mae Safi, author of forthcoming NOT THE GIRLS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, will serve as guest faculty.
Queen was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is an alum of the MFA program. She is the author of five published books, her most recent being an exploration of toxic masculinity and celebrity culture. Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She’s the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest.
Special guests will be:
Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian-American poet and scholar. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic.
Dan Handler, an American writer and musician. He is best known for his children’s series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, published under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket.
Ben Loory, an American short fiction writer based in Los Angeles, California. His first book, a collection entitled Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, was published by Penguin Books in 2011.
Jeff Shotts is a poet, teacher, and executive editor of Graywolf Press.
Alexandria Marzano Lesnevich, lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard. She is is the author of the highly acclaimed book,THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir.
David Ulin is the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of nine books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,the novella Labyrinth, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.
“We’re bringing in some great guests,” says Victoria Chang, MFA teaching faculty and poet. “I feel so lucky they have agreed to come to the residency this summer!”
