Fall 2025

Upcoming Events

November 19: Kevin Moffett

Former CMC Literature faculty Kevin Moffett joins us to read from and discuss his debut novel Only Son, longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. A bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home, Leslie Jamison calls it “a great glorious siren song of desperation and double helixes—at once a love story and an elegy.” Lunch provided; copies of Only Son for the first 20 attendees. Sign up here for a book.

Wednesday, November 19th, 12 – 1 pm, Kravis LC63, Claremont McKenna College

November 19: Penny Arcade, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Anna Joy Springer

Penny Arcade, alongside her collaborator, Steve Zehentner, will be presenting the well-loved touring show, Longing Lasts Longer, which is a unique blend of stand-up comedy and memoir set in a riveting rock and roll soundscape. It creates a crack in our planet’s post­gentrified landscape and shines a light on the path to individual authenticity.

Ronaldo V. Wilson will be performing Candy’s Visions, a live collage of video, dance, and voice that reveals a childhood persona exploring the springy telephone cord of desire linking the past and present, expanding between gulf, harbor, and sky.

Anna Joy Springer will be reading from her new project, Thieves’ Rebus, a puzzle prayer in birds and words.

Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 4:30 – 6:30 pm, Seaver Theater Large Studio #122, Pomona College.

Past Events

September 10: Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Netanyahus, will speak about fiction and its complicated relationship to history. Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called “a major American writer” by the New York Times, and “an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today” by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. After a selected reading from his works, Cohen will engage in a moderated conversation with Leland de la Durantaye, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025. Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College. Reception 5:30 pm, Dinner 6:00 pm, Reading/Talk 6:45 pm. Registration Required.

September 11: Discussion Panel + Film Screening with Vivek Narayanan, Pramila Venkateswaran, Anand Patwardhan & Prageeta Sharma

Anand Patwardhan has been making documentary films for over five decades, pursuing issues at the crux of social and political life in India. Many of his films were, at one time or another, banned by state television channels and became the subject of censorship rulings that Anand successfully challenged in court. Active in movements for inter-faith harmony and movements against unsustainable development, militarism, and nuclear nationalism, Anand describes himself as “a non-serious human being forced by circumstances to make serious films”.

Thursday, September 11, 2025. Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College. Discussion Panel 4:15 pm, Dinner Buffet 5:30 pm, Screening of The World Is Family 7:30 pm, Q&A with Anand Patwardhan 9:00 pm.

Registration is strongly encouraged: https://pomona.formstack.com/forms/panel_registration

September 12: Poetry Reading and Conversation with Vivek Narayanan and Pramila Venkateswaran

Vivek Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006/In Girum Books, 2011), Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins India, 2012), and After (New York Review of Books, 2022). A full-length collection of his poems was translated into Swedish and published in 2015 by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He was the coeditor of Almost Island, an India-based literary journal, from 2007 to 2019. His essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared in Agni, Granta, The Village Voice, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Caravan, and elsewhere, and his poems have been included in anthologies such as The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe), The Oxford Poets Anthology 2013 (Carcanet), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin), and Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton).Narayanan was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14), and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). He has taught history, anthropology and creative writing in many places, including the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. He teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University.

Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island, is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002), Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich, 2015), Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016) The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018), and We are Not a Museum (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her latest books are Exile is Not a Foreign Word (Copper Coin 2024) and Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics: Resistance, Solidarity and Power (Rowman and Littlefield 2024). We are Not a Museum won the New York Book Festival award in the poetry category, and Exile is Not a Foreign Word won the International Impact Book Award. Venkateswaran is Professor Emerita at Nassau Community College (SUNY), is actively involved in giving workshops and readings across Long Island and beyond, and is the co-coordinator of Matwaala South Asian Diaspora Poetry collective. She is on the Board of the Suffolk chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Friday, September 12. 1:30 pm, Freeberg Forum (Kravis LC62), Claremont McKenna College.

September 22: Ken Liu, The Future Is Implausible: Why Science Fiction Always Gets the Future Wrong (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

Through a series of images drawn by artists from the past imagining life in the future, Ken Liu, award-winning author of speculative fiction, asks the audience to think through provocative questions about the science fictional imagination. What do sci-fi authors tend to get wrong about the future? What do they tend to get right? Is science fiction about “predicting” the future? And just why is the future so difficult to pin down?

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France. Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. His latest book, All That We See or Seem, is a techno-thriller about the fight against loneliness in the age of AI. Mr. Liu is the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies’ 2025-26 Ricardo J. Quinones Lecturer.

Monday, September 22, 2025. Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College. Reception 5:30 pm, Dinner 6:00 pm, Reading/Talk 6:45 pm. Registration Required.

October 15: Poetry Reading with Jaswinder Bolina

Jaswinder Bolina’s most recent book, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2023 and is the winner of the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the author of three previous poetry collections: The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), as well as the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays, Of Color (2020), was published on McSweeney’s Quarterly Journal. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of English.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025. 6:00 pm, Claremont Public Library, 208 North Harvard Ave.

October 15: An Evening with Claudia Rankine

As part of its fall lecture series, the Justice Education Center (JEC) welcomes Claudia Rankine, an award-winning poet, playwright, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient.

Rankine has written extensively about social justice and racial injustice, most notably in her award-winning works including Citizen: An American Lyric and TRIAGE. Her writings explore the subtle and overt forms of racism and systemic oppression that Black Americans experience in daily life and in the media, using poetry, essays, and other forms to challenge readers to confront racial bias and societal structures.  

Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025. 7:00 pm, Benson Auditorium, Pitzer College

October 17: Poetry in the Galleries with Jaswinder Bolina

Jaswinder Bolina’s most recent book, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press and is the winner of the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the author of three previous poetry collections: The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), as well as the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays, Of Color (2020), was published on McSweeney’s Quarterly Journal. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of English.

Friday, October 17, 2025. 3:00 pm, Peggy Phelps Art Gallery, 925 N. Dartmouth, Claremont Graduate University

October 20: Premier of Outrider with Anne Waldman and Alystyre Julian

Alystyre Julian’s OUTRIDER is a portal into fast-speaking poet Anne Waldman and her decades spent gathering kindred spirits. In immersive jaunts of collaboration, the first feature-length portrait of Waldman traces the poet’s century-crossing lineage of artistic and liberatory practices, from the downtown New York scene and the founding of the dynamic Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church; to the Naropa University Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; to Big Sur, Mexico City, Morocco, and onward.

Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and poetic kinships with radical female musicians—Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Cecilia Vicuña, Meredith Monk—Waldman embodies her role as a visionary word-worker and transcendent presence laboring in defense of community and craft.

Through readings, in song, and in conversation, OUTRIDER celebrates Waldman as an inimitable creative and social force dedicated to the propulsion of the artistic imagination and the close ties which form in its wake.

Monday, October 20, 2025. Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College. Dinner reception, 6 pm. Screening and Q&A, 7:30 pm.

October 21: Drawing/Writing Studio Workshop with Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 22. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out now. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025. 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Studio Art Hall 216, Pomona College. Lunch included. Students only. Registration required: https://pomona.formstack.com/forms/myles_art_studio_performance

October 21: Reading by Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, and Eileen Myles

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her sixth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was named a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award and has garnered additional support from The Poetry Foundation, Library Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A well-regarded and popular teacher of creative writing, she has more than twenty years’ experience teaching across genres in intimate workshops and large lectures in community, undergraduate, and graduate settings. From 2015 – 2023, she served as faculty at Bard College’s MFA Program in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts where she was named Co-Chair of the discipline of Writing and served in that capacity from 2020 to 2023. She currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University as an Assistant Professor and serves as a mentor for writers as part of the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper’s, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 22. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out now. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025. 4:15 pm, Ena Thompson Reading Room, Crookshank 108, Pomona College.

October 22: Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature and the Challenge of Language

Seth Lerer taught for over 45 years at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on children’s literature, the history of the English language, and medieval and Renaissance literature. His books include Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History form Aesop to Harry Potter, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism. He is also the author of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and most recently Introducing the History of the English Language. He is currently visiting professor of literature a CMC.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025. Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College. Reception 5:30 pm, Dinner 6:00 pm, Reading/Talk 6:45 pm. Registration Required.

October 23: Pitzer Alumni Reading: Donna R. Phillips ’13 and Rose Bowen ’21

Come celebrate recently published books by Pitzer alumni Donna R. Phillips ’13 and Rose Bowen ’21! Snacks and refreshments will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

Donna R. Phillips ’13 was raised in California and comes from a family of writers. On her father’s side, her great-great-uncle was the Welsh poet, W. H. Davies. He is best known for his memoir, Autobiography of a Supertramp, published in 1908. Her mother published non-fiction and had one novel published. Her sister had three historical novels published. Donna earned her AA from Citrus College and then attended Pitzer College through the New Resources program and graduated in 2013 with a BA in English and World Literature (Creative Writing track). She graduated from Claremont Graduate University with her MA in English Literature in 2016. Donna worked as a tutor and supplemental instructor at Mt. San Antonio College. She also taught English at Citrus College. Her first book of short stories, Among the Reeds and Other Stories of the Supernatural, was published in July 2025.

Rose Bowen ‘21 discovered her passion for sparking creativity in others while studying at Pitzer College, where she embraced the idea that the mind is a wonderland that can be explored through art and expression. After graduating from Pitzer in 2021, Rose earned her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from USC. Rose now splits her time between writing, reading voraciously, and spending time with her fur babies — four dogs and two cats. Her debut poetry collection, Ink Blot Girl (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2024), explores the intersections of mental health, identity, and imagination. Her next book, The Lady in the Hurricane Dress, is scheduled for release in December 2025.

Thursday, October 23, 2025, 6:00 p.m. Grove House, Pitzer College.

October 27: Cleyvis Natera and Myriam Chancy

Join us for a free lunch and conversation with author Cleyvis Natera and Myriam Chancy, Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities. Natera is the author of The Grand Paloma Resort, a thrilling novel set at a Dominican Republic resort where two local girls go missing. A commentary on social class, race, family, and community, this is a novel you won’t want to put down. Don’t miss the chance to hear from Natera herself when she comes to campus!

Monday, October 27, 2025. Noon, Hampton Room, Scripps College. Registration Required.

October 28: Alicia Jo Rabins

Please join the CWPD for a lunchtime reading and conversation with multitalented writer Alicia Jo Rabins, who will read from her work and chat with us about writing across genres and forms, feminist readings of Torah, the interplay between poetry and music, and more. Lunch and a copy of Rabins’ poetry book Divinity School provided to the first 20 registered attendees. Register here.

Tuesday, October 28th, 2025, 12:15-1:15 pm, Freeberg Forum (Kravis LC62), Claremont McKenna College

October 29: Daniel Tam-Claiborne: Reading and in Conversation with Belinda Tang

In Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, two young women in China and the United States negotiate coming of age and identity in a world upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tam-Claiborne will read from and discuss this “gorgeously written, complex, and profoundly moving meditation on place, language, and belonging…” (Lauren Groff), in conversation with Belinda Tang, Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at CMC. Copies of Transplants provided to the first 20 registered attendees. Sign up here for a book.

Register with the Ath for reception, dinner and talk (or show up at 6:45 for the talk only, no registration required)

Wednesday, October 29th @ 5:30 pm, M.M.C. Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College

Other campus events can be found by visiting the websites for Scripps Presents, the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at CMC, the Pomona College English Department, and the Tufts Poetry Awards at CGU.