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Home 2025 MFACW January Evening Reading Series

2025 MFACW January Evening Reading Series

Dec 3, 2024

Join the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) from Sunday, January 5 through Wednesday, January 8, 2025, as the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFACW) program presents an Evening Reading Series featuring program mentors and special guests. Each evening will engage its audience with poetry, memoir, or fiction from some of today’s most vibrant and vital writers. These events will be held both in-person and virtually via livestream.

All readings will be livestreamed on the IAIA website and Facebook. See links below to watch the livestreams.

Evening Reading Series Events

Bios

James Thomas Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk) was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1966 and grew up between Six Nations Reserve in Ontario (the birthplace of his grandfather), the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York (birthplace of his grandmother), and the Tuscarora Reservation in western New York (where his grandparents settled). He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics, and Brown University’s graduate C.W. program. Stevens is the author of eight books of poetry, including, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, The Mutual Life, Bulle/Chimere, and DisOrient, and he has recently finished a new manuscript, The Golden Book. He is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and teaches in IAIA’s undergraduate and graduate Creative Writing Programs. He teaches Poetry, Creative nonfiction, Native American literature, and literary world survey courses. He lives in Cañoncito, New Mexico.

Toni Jensen (Métis) is an essayist, short story writer, and mentor in the MFACW program. She is the author of the short story collection From the Hilltop and Carry, a memoir-in-essays about gun violence. Jensen 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.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), published by BOA Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). A Kundiman community member, his honors include the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. His work appears in many publications, including three editions of The Best American Poetry and two editions of The Forward Book of Poetry. He teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch. He edits the online poetry journals, Underblong and the lickety~split. He lives in Rochester, New York.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Indigenous to Colombia) was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She lives in California.

Abby Chabitnoy (Aleutian) is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022), How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and the lino-cut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2020). Abigail is a mentor for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing and an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak.

Bettye Keerse Born was born in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in Northern California, she holds a B.A. in Genetics from the University of California at Berkeley, a Ph.D. in Biology from New York University, and an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University. She and her husband have a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren. In 1990, she became the griotte of her family when her mother entrusted her with a box of family memorabilia, prompting her to write The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family, a work that took nearly thirty years of research and rewriting. The memoir, which blends personal family history with a broader tribute to African American contributions, explores the perseverance and strength of her ancestors, showing how enslaved Africans survived and contributed to America, passing those traits down through generations. A pediatrician in Boston, she provided care for children and supported parents, and she had rewarding experiences traveling to China for an international adoption agency and serving on the board of From Roots to Wings, an organization supporting grandparents raising grandchildren.

Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish) was born in Spokane, Washington. She received her BA from the University of Washington in Seattle and her MA and MFA in Fiction from Cornell University. From 1991 to 1998, Earling held positions in both Native American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. Currently, she is an associate professor in the English Department there and teaches Fiction and Native American Studies. Earling’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Northeast Indian Quarterly, and many anthologies including Song of the Turtle (Old World/Ballantine); Contemporary Short Stories Celebrating Women; Circle of Women (Red River Books); Talking Leaves: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Short Stories (Delta). Perma Red (Blue Hen Books 2002) is her first novel. It received the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West in 2003, the Mountain and Plains Bookseller Association Award, WWA’s Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. It is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as part of its Discover Great New Writers series.

Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her debut novel-in-stories Crooked Hallelujah was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Story Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Dublin Literary Award, and The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. She teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Brittney Means is a Chicana writer and editor living in Albuquerque, NM. A graduate of Iowa’s MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has worked with Inara Verzemnieks and Kiese Laymon. She has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award, the Geneva Fellowship, the Grace Paley Fellowship, and the Herodotus Award.

Pam Houston is a mentor in the MFACW program and the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, as 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 won the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and several teaching awards. In addition to teaching in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Houston 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.

Geoff Harris worked as Vice-President of Story and Writer Development at NBC, prior to becoming a professional TV writer and teacher, where he oversaw the Story Department and developed prime-time 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 US. As a writer, Harris 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 45 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. Johns College.

Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe) is a poet, IAIA alum, and mentor in the MFACW program. She is the author of the poetry collections Chromosomory and WHEREAS. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB. She has received many awards, including the NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK.

MFA in Creative Writing

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is designed as a two-year program with two intensive week-long residencies per year (summer and winter) at IAIA. Students and faculty mentors gather for a week of workshops, lectures, and readings. At the end of the residency week, each student is matched with a faculty mentor, who then works one-on-one with the student for the semester. IAIA’s program is unique in that we emphasize the importance of Indigenous writers speaking to the Indigenous experience. The literature we read carries a distinct Native American and First Nations emphasis. The MAFCW offers four areas of emphasis: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting.

The deadline to apply for the 2025 academic year is Feb. 1 by 5 pm (MST).