The MFA in Creative Writing Program (MFACW) at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is excited to announce its 2023 July Evening Reading Series to be held July 16–20 from 6:00–7:30 pm at the IAIA campus at 83 Avan Nu Po Road in the Center for Lifelong Education (CLE) Commons. The line-up for its tenth-anniversary summer celebration includes teaching mentors with the program—Abigail Chabitnoy (Tangirnaq Native Village member and Koniag descendant), Jamie Figueroa (Boricua), Chip Livingston (mixed Creek), Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), Pam Houston, Ramona Ausubel (attending virtually), Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma) ’16, Brandon Hobson (Cherokee Nation), and Raquel Gutiérrez, as well as a group of four Lannan Visiting Writers—poet Safia Elhillo, recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University; IAIA alumn and Reservation Dogs writer Ryan RedCorn (Osage) ’20; Kerry Howley, a feature writer at New York magazine; and Marcela Fuentes, who has a two-book deal with Viking books set for release in 2024.

Except for the Wednesday, July 19 event with Ryan RedCorn, all speaker events will be livestreamed.

Abigail Chabitnoy (Tangirnaq Native Village Member and Koniag Descendant), MFACW Mentor
Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish, winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. Most recently, she was the recipient of the Witter Bynner Funded Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO, and has guest-lectured at Colorado State University and Denver University. She is a Koniag descendant and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak.

Jamie Figueroa (Boricua), MFACW Mentor
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney‘s, and Kweli Journal, among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Scholar. A VONA alum, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Figueroa‘s memoir in essays is forthcoming by Pantheon Books.

Chip Livingston (Mixed-blood Creek), MFACW Mentor
Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of six books: three collections of poetry, Saints of the Republic (2023), Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (2012), and Museum of False Starts (2010); a nonfiction book for elementary school students, Early People of Florida (2023); a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction, Naming Ceremony (2014); and a novel, Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death (2017). He is the editor of Love Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie (2022). Chip has received awards from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip’s writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and Cincinnati Review and on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Foundation’s websites. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Regis University.

Evening Reading Series Events

• • Sunday, July 16, 6–7:30 pm (MDT): Readings by Abigail Chabitnoy (Tangirnaq Native Village Member and Koniag Descendant), Jamie Figueroa (Boricua), and Chip Livingston (Mixed-blood Creek)—CLE Commons and livestream
  • Monday, July 17, 6–7:30 pm (MDT): Readings by Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), Pam Houston, and Marcela Fuentes—CLE Commons and livestream
  • Tuesday, July 18, 6–7:30 pm (MDT): Readings by Kerry Howley, Safia Elhillo, and Ramona Ausubel—CLE Commons and livestream
  • Wednesday, July 19, 6–7:30 pm (MDT): Reading by Ryan RedCorn (Osage) ’20—CLE Commons (no livestream)
  • Thursday, July 20, 6–7:30 pm (MDT): Readings by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma) ’16, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Brandon Hobson (Cherokee Nation)—CLE Commons and livestream

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.