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 evening followed by a reception. All events are free, open to the public, and held in the Mills Hall Living Room, unless otherwise indicated.

Spring 2018 Literary Series

Charlotte Biltekoff

Tuesday February 13, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room
Produced in collaboration with the Mills Community Farm

• Charlotte Biltekoff’s book Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health explores the social and cultural dimensions of dietary advice and the changing meaning of “eating right” over the last century. Her work has been the subject of a short film and published in a wide range of academic journals. She is associate professor of American Studies and Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis.

Fady Joudah

Tuesday March 27, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Fady Joudah's fourth poetry collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. His poetry and translations have earned him numerous national and international prizes, the Yale Series, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Griffin Poetry prize among others. He is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston, Texas.

Tananarive Due

Tuesday April 3, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Tananarive Due is a screenwriter, award-winning novelist, and leading voice in black speculative fiction. Her most recent book, Ghost Summer, won a British Fantasy Award and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Due is the author of 12 novels and a civil rights memoir. She teaches Afrofuturism and black horror at UCLA and creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University.

MFA Alumnae Reading & Reception
Tuesday April 10, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room
Reception at 5:15 pm for newly admitted graduate students, followed by readings

Andrea Abi-Karam

Tuesday April 10, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Andrea Abi-Karam is an Arab American genderqueer punk poet cyborg. Their first full-length book Extratransmission is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in early 2018. Abi-Karam’s previous work, The Aftermath (Commune Editions) attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Abi-Karam is also a printer and publisher whose small press project Mes Editions seeks to publish emerging writings from queers, people of color, and those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in poetry and art scenes. Catch them on the 2018 Sister Spit tour.

Michelle Cruz Gonzales

Tuesday April 10, 2018 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. Before attending Mills College, Gonzales played drums in and wrote lyrics for the groundbreaking 90s femme punk band Spitboy— the subject of the 2017 documentary, Turn it Around: Story of East Bay Punk. Gonzales holds a BA and MFA in English and creative writing from Mills and is an English instructor at Las Positas College.

Fall 2017 Literary Series

Patty Yumi Cottrell

Tuesday September 19, 2017 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Patty Yumi Cottrell was born in South Korea. Ed Park describes her novel, Sorry To Disturb the Peace, as "a sort of Korean-American noir, lean and wry and darkly compelling," and Danielle Dutton calls it "a beguiling debut: absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad....” Cottrell's work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review. She lives in New York.

Lillian Howan

Tuesday October 3, 2017 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Join us to celebrate the release of Lillian Howan's novel The Charm Buyers, a novel about Tahiti during the last years of French nuclear testing. Howan’s writings have been published in the Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, New England Review, and the anthology Under Western Eyes. She is the editor of legendary playwright Wakako Yamauchi’s collection, Rosebud and Other Stories.

Daniel Borzutsky

**WEDNESDAY** October 25 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Daniel Borzutsky’s The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award, has been described as “one of contemporary poetry’s most cogent documents of humanity and suffering in the 21st century.” His other books include Lake Michigan, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, Memories of my Overdevelopment, and The Book of Interfering Bodies. His translations from Spanish include Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love.

Elizabeth Willis

Tuesday November 14, 2017 | 5:30 pm | Mills Hall Living Room

• Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book, Alive: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other books include Address, Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. She is also the editor of Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She taught poetry at Mills College from 1995 to 2002. In 2015 she joined the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.