John Gossage, photographer and bookmaker, and Teju Cole, a writer and photographer, will be the featured in conversation at this year's Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at UC Davis. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place Thursday, Jan. 15 at 4:30 p.m. at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Maceo Montoya’s latest release, Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), co-authored with poet Javier O. Huerta, has won an American Book Award. Professor Montoya is a writer and visual artist teaching in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program, all in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Before joining the Department of English at UC Davis last fall, Cindy Juyoung Ok was already making waves with her newly published poetry collection, "Ward Toward." She spoke with L&S Magazine to discuss the experimental work and her decision to leave teaching to pursue her writing.
Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. We're hoping to read more fiction this summer, so our July selections include novels from faculty in the Department of English and Department of Chicana/o/x Studies as well as graduates of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.
Shayne Langford, a lecturer in the Department of English in the College of Letters and Science, won the Maurice Prize for Fiction for his unpublished novel, which he's been working on since his days as an undergraduate at UC Davis. John Lescroart, who started the prize, called Langford's manuscript “dark and powerful.”
Are you a poet? A writer? An essayist? If so, the College of Letters and Science’s Department of English is hosting seven writing contests open to UC Davis graduate and undergraduate students. Deadlines are in April.
Telling women’s stories is what excites writer Iris Jamahl Dunkle. Since 2019, the biographer, poet and creative writing instructor has been shedding light on these previously underappreciated women in two books as well as a weekly online newsletter. Her latest book, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb," is about a female writer who, while living among Dust Bowl refugees in California.
As part of UC Davis' celebration of 30 years of Eggheads, Trevor Bashaw, creative writing MFA candidate and associate instructor of English, was asked to write a poem inspired by the famous public art. Bashaw shared his poem during the Robert Arneson Eggheads 30th Anniversary Launch Party at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on April 4.
Jessica Guerrieri (B.A., English, ’07) is this year’s winner of the Maurice Prize for Fiction. The prize, which includes a $10,000 award, is given to a UC Davis graduate who has not yet published a novel. Guerrieri wrote the novel she submitted, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, during the COVID pandemic lockdown.
