Reading Series April 2019

Justin Torres' first novel We the Animals, a national best seller, has been translated into fifteen languages and was adapted into a feature film. He has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and elsewhere, as well as nonfiction in The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at The New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012’s 5 Under 35. He has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endownment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Recently, he served as Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Erika Jo Brown is the author of the poetry collection I’m Your Huckleberry (Brooklyn Arts Press) and co-edited Beatrice Hastings: On the Life and Work of a Lost Modern Master (Pleiades Press).  She's a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Capote Fellow. Currently, she co-organizes the monthly Poison Pen reading series and works at MD Anderson Children's Cancer Hospital through WITS. Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in poetry in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

Brenden Oliva grew up a half-Mexican half-Mormon mutt in Podunk, north Utah. He put himself through school driving forklifts, changing oil, repossessing houses, and building custom Harleys. Despite graduating from the University of Utah, he went back to graveyards at the airbag factory until he almost got blown up. After that he decided to try writing and earned an MFA from the University of Montana while editing fiction for CutBank magazine. He's currently finishing a Literature and Creative Writing PhD at the University of Houston as well as his first novel.

T. Dallas Saylor is a 3rd-year MFA student in the UH Creative Writing Program. He is originally from Delaware, although he used to live in Texas during elementary school. His poetry often deals with Catholicism, sex, and math.