Fall 2026 Writer's Workshop Reading Series
We welcome you to the Fall 2026 Reading Series! It's a great lineup of authors and writers to inspire. All events are free and open to the public.
Prageeta Sharma
Wednesday, September 23
Reading
7:30 P.M.
Samual Bak Museum
2289 S 67th St. Omaha
Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Onement Won (Wave, 2025) and Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize. A visionary leader in the literary arts, she is the founder of “Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, and Literary Studies,” an interdisciplinary national conference that reshaped institutional conversations around race and creative practice. Her debut collection, The Opening Question (2004), won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and she is a recipient of a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship and a 2010 Howard Foundation Award. She is currently the Henry G. Lee ’37 professor of English at Pomona College, where she received the 2023 Wig Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching and mentorship.
Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, September 30
Reading
7:30 P.M.
Criss Library
Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is co-editor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, for artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Laylah Ali, Suné Woods and Jaime Cortez, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Photo credit: Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Laired Hunt
Wednesday, October 14
Reading
7:30 P.M.
Criss Library
Born in Singapore in 1968 to American parents, Laird Hunt is the author of nine novels, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal in Literary Excellence. A former United Nations press officer who was largely raised in rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and spends his days with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, their daughter, Eva, and two cats. A new novel, Burn the Blue Water, will be published in 2027 by Bloomsbury.
Mona Awad
Wednesday, October 28
Reading
6:00 P.M.
Omaha Library
7205 Dodge St. Omaha
Mona Awad is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. She is a three-time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, the recipient of an Amazon Best First Novel Award, and a two-time finalist for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s and TIME magazine, among others. Her latest novel, We Love You, Bunny, was an instant New York Times bestseller and shortlist finalist for the Giller prize.
William Reliford and Charisma Johnson
Wednesday, November 11
Presentation
7:30 P.M.
Benson Theatre
6054 Maple St, Omaha
William Reliford is an award-winning visual effects artist and 3D animator with more than 25 years of experience. As the principal artist behind Real Images Visual Effects, he creates high-quality visual effects, forensic animations, scientific visualizations, and animated content for filmmakers, law firms, engineering firms, and corporate clients. A filmmaker at heart, William’s background in independent film production and post-production serves as the foundation for his strong visual storytelling abilities, allowing him to communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively. His work spans feature films, educational media, promotional content, and demonstrative evidence animations for courtroom trials.
Inspired by classic science fiction films and driven by a lifelong passion for storytelling and artistic innovation, William continues to push creative boundaries through inventive visual solutions and compelling design. To see more of his work, visit realimagesvfx.com
Charisma Faye Johnson is the writer and script supervisor of her short film Get Wrecked, produced by the Nebraska Film Initiative. Her poetry has appeared in the 13th Floor Magazine, and she has worked as a copy-editor at Technical Communications Quarterly. She earned a BA in Linguistics and a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.