Writer's Workshop Reading Series

Series Lineup

All readings are free and open to the public.

Photos of each speaker are available on the series poster.

Lisa Fay Coutley | September 13

7:30 P.M.

UNO Art Gallery

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition: and In the Carnival of Breathing, (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Recent prose and poetry have been published in Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse and Poets & Writers. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Kao Kalia Yang | September 20

7:30 P.M.

UNO Art Gallery

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong-American author, film-maker, and teacher. She is also a co-founder of Words Wanted, a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. Kalia was born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in 1980; she and her family came to Minnesota in the summer of 1987, and her first book, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, reflects upon this move. A review by Publishers Weekly praises Kalia, “Yang tells her family’s story with grace; she narrates their struggles, beautifully weaving in Hmong folklore and culture.” It is the first Hmong-authored book to gain national distribution from a literary press, the only book to have ever garnered two Minnesota Book Awards, the best-selling book in Coffee House Press History, and earned an NEA Big Read title.

Donovan Mixon | October 4

7:30 P.M.

Milo Bail Student Center Dodge Room

Donovan Mixon is a crossover artist. He was a faculty member at Berklee College of Music when he won a NEA grant for jazz composition. Five years later he moved to Europe; the move abroad turned out to be a seventeen-year sojourn living as a freelance performing artist, clinician and college professor, presenting at jazz festivals, and at educational institutions throughout the world: Istanbul, Budapest, Shanghai, Singapore. During these years, Donovan released four recordings that feature prominent musicians from Boston to Milan to Istanbul, including great alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. Meanwhile, Mixon had also become a writer. Ahgottahandleonit is his Young Adult novel. A graphic novel, “Race for Next to Last Place,” is now in the works.

Danielle Deulen | October 11

7:30 P.M.

Milo Bail Student Center Dodge Room

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of The Riots from the (U. of Georgia Press, 2011), which won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. She’s also the author of Lovely Asunder from (U. of Arkansas Press in 2011), that won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award; and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, winner of the 2015 Barrow Street Book Contest. Poet David Wojahn called it “a book of sustained and haunting power.” Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Utne Reader, and The Missouri Review, as well as anthologies. She is the poetry editor of Acre Books and lives in Salem, Oregon, where she teaches at Willamette University.

Natalie Diaz | November 1

7:30 P.M.

Milo Bail Student Center Dodge Room

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. Natalie is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious ... beautiful book.” Her honors and awards include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

Theodore Wheeler | November 15

7:30 P.M.

Milo Bail Student Center Dodge Room

Theodore Wheeler is the author of the novel Kings of Broken Things (Little A, 2017) and a collection of short stories Bad Faith (Queens Fairy Press, 2016). His short ficition has appeared in Best New American Voices, New Stories from the Midwest, The Southern Review, Boulevard, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He covers a civil law and politics beat as a reporter and teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.