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English Reading Series
Fridays at Noon in the HBLL Auditorium

Nonfiction

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Jimmy Baca — January 28, 2022

January 05, 2022 12:00 AM
Jimmy Baca is an American poet, memoirist, and screenwriter from New Mexico. While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, he learned to read and began to turn his life around, eventually emerging as a prolific artist of the spoken and written word.
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Lance Larsen — March 4, 2022

January 05, 2022 12:00 AM
Lance Larsen has published five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). Former poet laureate of Utah, he has received a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and the Southwest Writers Award. His nonfiction has appeared in Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Brevity, Brief Encounters (a Norton anthology), and elsewhere. He plays a scrappy game of basketball, loves Skagen watches, and grows hostas with exotic names like Blue Angel and Fire and Ice. He often fools around with aphorisms: “A woman needs a man the way a manatee needs a glockenspiel.” Sometimes he juggles.
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Nicole Walker — February 18, 2022

January 05, 2022 12:00 AM
NICOLE WALKER is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, Sustainability: A Love Story, Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She edits the Crux series at University of Georgia press, is nonfiction editor at Diagram, and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.
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George Handley — March 11, 2022

January 05, 2022 12:00 AM
George Handley teaches and writes about the environmental humanities at BYU. His publications include the environmental memoir, Home Waters; a novel, American Fork; and two recent collections of essays, If Truth Were A Child and The Hope of Nature. He is a founding member of LDS Earth Stewardship, Conserve Utah Valley, and Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. He currently serves on the board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy of Utah and on the Provo City Council.
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Amy Leach — April 1, 2022

January 05, 2022 12:00 AM
Amy Leach grew up in Texas and earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and numerous other publications, including Granta, A Public Space, Orion, Tin House, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Her books are Things That Are and The Everybody Ensemble. Leach lives in Bozeman and teaches creative writing at MSU.
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Phyllis Barber — October 8, 2021

August 30, 2021 12:00 AM
Phyllis Barber is the author of ten books—two novels (THE DESERT BETWEEN US and AND THE DESERT SHALL BLOSSOM), three memoirs, three collections of short stories and essays, and young adult fiction. A once-upon-a-time student at BYU, she has been cited as notable in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2011 and BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2011, and her memoir, HOW I GOT CULTURED, was the winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. The Smith-Pettit Foundation and the Association for Mormon Letters have also awarded her for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, and she has been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
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Hasanthika Sirisena — December 3, 2021

August 30, 2021 12:00 AM
Hasanthika Sirisena’s work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021).
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Brevity Panel — March 12, 2021

March 12, 2021 12:00 AM
For two decades Brevity Magazine (brevitymag.com) has been the premier online home for innovative and thought-provoking micro-essays of 750 words or less. To celebrate the recent publication of the journal’s anthology, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, we’ve invited editors Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere, along with a handful of anthology contributors, to join us for a special flash nonfiction reading. In addition to sharing their work, our guests will hold a live panel discussion on the ins and outs of crafting and publishing flash nonfiction.
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Jerald Walker — February 26, 2021

February 26, 2021 12:00 AM
Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult; Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption; and, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award.He has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, The Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, and The Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including five times in The Best American Essays anthology. Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College.
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Athena Dixon — January 29, 2021

January 29, 2021 12:00 AM
A native of Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is the author of The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press) and No God in This Room (Argus House Press). Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Athena’s work has appeared in various publications including GAY Magazine and Narratively. She is founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal and is the co-host of the New Books in Poetry Podcast via the New Books Network. She resides in Philadelphia. Learn more about the author at www.athenadixon.com.
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Joey Franklin — November 13, 2020

September 28, 2020 12:00 AM
Joey Franklin is the author of Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays (Nebraska, 2020) and My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married (Nebraska, 2015). His essays and articles have appeared in Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere. He currently serves as co-editor of the literary magazine Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and coordinates the MFA program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His active projects include a memoir about the saints and scoundrels in his family tree, and a practical guide to professionalization in creative writing.
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Patrick Madden — October 2, 2020

September 28, 2020 12:00 AM
Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), and co-editor of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015). He curates www.quotidiana.org, co-edits the journal Fourth Genre with Joey Franklin, and, with David Lazar, co-edits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press. He has taught English at BYU since 2004.
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Jennifer Sinor — October 23, 2020

September 28, 2020 12:00 AM
Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, including Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe and the memoir Ordinary Trauma. Her forthcoming essay collection, Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World, will appear in the fall of 2020 from the University of Nebraska Press, and her essays have been published in many literary journals including The American Scholar, Utne, Creative Nonfiction, and Gulf Coast. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism as well as nominations for the National Magazine Award and the Pushcart Prize, Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She lives in Logan with her husband, poet Michael Sowder, and her two sons.
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Ashley Mae Hoiland — September 25, 2020

September 28, 2020 12:00 AM
Ashley Mae Hoiland is the author of One Hundred Birds Taught me to Fly and A New Constellation, both of which were nominated for various awards. She received a BFA in painting and an MFA in poetry, both at BYU. She teaches online writing classes through her platform, Mine To Tell and is currently working on writing and illustrating her next book. She lives in Provo with her husband and three children.
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Randon Billings Noble – February 14, 2020

February 14, 2020 12:00 AM
Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, and her lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, listed as notable in The Best American Essays, and appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Currently she is editing an anthology of lyric essays forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, and she is the founding editor of the online literary journal After the Art.
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