Oct
14
MFA Programs in Writing: reading with Lydi Conklin and Jessica Abughattas
Please Join the MFA Programs in Writing for a Reading with
Lydi Conklin and Jessica Abughattas
All are welcome to join! Reception and book sale to follow
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Humanities Instructional Bldg 135
@6pm
Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, VQR, and elsewhere. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip, winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poem-A-Day, The Yale Review, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. A former poet laureate of Altadena, CA, her lyric essays on post-fire Los Angeles can be found in West Branch and Orion Magazine. She received an MFA from Antioch University and currently serves as Co-Chair for Kundiman’s Southern California regional group.
