Join the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) from Monday, January 8 through Friday, January 12, 2024, 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.

Evening Reading Series Events

• (Canceled) Monday, January 8, 6:30 pm (MST): Readings by Carribean Fragoza, Brian Evenson, and Janet Sarbanes from CalArts—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
• Tuesday, January 9, 6:30 pm (MST): Readings by dg okpik (Iñupiaq-Inuit), Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), Jennifer Foerster (Muscogee [Creek] Nation of Oklahoma)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
• Wednesday, January 10, 6:30 pm (MST): Readings by Pam Houston, Raquel Gutierrez, Bojan Louis (Diné)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
• Thursday, January 11, 6:30 pm (MST): Readings by Leslie Jamison, Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
• Friday, January 12, 4:30–6 pm (MST): Reading and Q&A with Kim Blaeser (White Earth Nation) and Deborah Taffa (Quechan [Yuma] Nation and Laguna Pueblo)—IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA)

Bios

Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams; The Recovering; Make it Scream, Make it Burn; and a novel, The Gin Closet. Her next book, a memoir called Splinters, comes out in February 2024. She writes frequently for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the nonfiction writing program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) 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.

Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe) is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and the newly released novel A Council of Dolls. Fellowships in support of her work include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, and Ploughshares. Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, born and raised in Chicago. She graduated from Harvard Law School and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in Minnesota.

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 2024 academic year is Feb. 1 by 5 pm (MST).