Experience a Dynamic Literary Community.

The Contemporary Writers Series at Mills College features monthly readings and talks by renowned and emerging writers. Graduate students produce and promote the series, which brings the Mills community and San Francisco Bay Area audiences together to enjoy an intimate cultural evening. All events are free, open to the public, and for the fall 2020 semester, held online.

Fall 2020 Literary Series

Lara Mimosa Montes

Thursday, September 17, 2020 | 12:15 pm PST | Zoom (RSVP to receive the event link)

• Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES, a meditation on the Bronx of the 70s and 80s, gentrification, trauma, and loss. Her work has appeared in Fence, BOMB, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo fellow and has been awarded residencies from Storm King: Shandaken, Marble House Project, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, Lara was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Currently, she is a senior editor of Triple Canopy and lives in Minnesota.

Fowzia Karimi

Thursday, October 8, 2020 | 12:15 pm | Zoom (RSVP to receive the event link)

• Fowzia Karimi is a writer, illustrator, and alumni of the Mills MFA in Creative Writing Program. As Publishers Weekly describes, her illuminated debut novel Above Us the Milky Way “renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs.” Karimi also illustrated The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene. She is the recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and lives in Texas.

West Oakland to West Africa

Thursday, October 22, 2020 | 12:15 pm PST | Zoom (RSVP to receive the event link)

• This special event welcomes poets and alumni of the Mills MFA in Creative Writing Program where this international exchange first began and celebrates the new anthology Our Spirits Carry Our Voices. As the mission statement describes, “West Oakland to West Africa provides a sustained exchange to connect members of the African diaspora and Africa through creative writing. Our core values are to create a safe place for the transparent healing and growth of Black people; to deliver innovative and authentic forms of writing and to engage the medium of spoken word to shape and define the narratives of the diaspora; to allow a visceral and uncensored critique of social systems through artistic expression.”

Jordy Rosenberg in Conversation with Susan Stryker, 2020–22 Barbara Lee Distinguished Professor of Women's Leadership (RSVP to receive the event link)

Thursday, November 5, 2020 | time TBA | mark your calendar

• Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a love story set in the eighteenth-century London of notorious thieves and queer subcultures. This genre-bending debut tells a profound story of gender, desire, and liberation which Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called “Astonishing and mesmerizing.” A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection, Confessions has been shortlisted for multiple awards and was named a best book of 2018 by the New Yorker, Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, and others. Rosenberg is a Professor of Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and gender and sexuality studies.
  
  Co-sponsored by We Are the Voices.