Please join us this afternoon as alumni and students in the University of California, Riverside Master of Fine Arts writing program come together and read from their work. Readers include David Campos, Deb Durham, Andy Holt, Ruth Nolan, Nicole Olweean and Alex Ratanapratum.
David Campos is the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press 2015), winner of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Huizache, The Packinghouse Review, Verdad, and Miramar, among other journals and magazines. He is a Canto Mundo Fellow and lives in Fresno, California.
Deb Durham immigrated to California from the untamed cornfields of Southern Indiana for the sole purpose of writing nonfiction creatively. Her abiding obsessions include teen romance novels of the 1950's and her chihuahua Rockhudson.
Andy Holt was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. As a result, his blood is mostly lemon-lime Gatorade. He is currently working on a crime novel set in the wilds of suburban Florida.
Ruth Nolan, M.F.A., M.A., is a Mojave Desert/Coachella Valley-based author and professor whose writing is grounded in the California desert, where she’s lived for most of her life, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert. She is editor of the critically-acclaimed anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts, published by Heyday Books, Berkeley. She is writing a memoir about her work as a wildland firefighter in the California Desert District and Western U.S. for the BLM and USFS in the 1980’s. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in Rattling Wall, Short Fiction Los Angeles (Red Hen Press 2016), New California Writing (Heyday), Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Sierra Club Desert Report, the Desert Oracle and many other publications. She blogs about life in the desert for KCET Artbound Los Angeles, Inlandia Literary Journeys, and Heyday, and leads writing and
literature seminars at the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park and for many other colleges and organizations. She is a 2014 graduate of the UCR Low Residency Creative Writing and Creative Writing for the Performing Arts program.
Nicole Olweean is a second year poet in UCR's MFA program. She is originally from Michigan, where many of the people and places that inspire her work still remain. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge and Bird's Thumb.
Alex Ratanapratum is a Thai/American poet from Orange County, California. He received his B.A.s from CSULB in English Literature and Creative Writing and is in his second year at UCR. He has been a workshop leader for Cambodia's first literary journal Nou Hach in Phnom Penh, and his poems have been published in Rip Rap, Nou Hach, and The Asian American Literary Review.
