Spring 2024

February 20: An Evening with Michael Chabon

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Michael Chabon will join Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions George Thomas for a brief reading followed by a wide-ranging discussion about literature and society. 

A prolific writer who blends and subverts genre conventions, Chabon has published novels, personal essays, comics, newspaper serials, screenplays, and children’s books, as well as collaborated with acclaimed music producer Mark Ronson as a lyricist for Ronson’s album Uptown Special.  As a screenwriter, he was executive producer, writer, and showrunner for the first season of Star Trek: Picard starring Patrick Stewart, and is now co-showrunner of the forthcoming Showtime series The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024, Dinner Program, 6 p.m., Athanaeum, Claremont McKenna College. Registration Required.

February 22: Layli Long Soldier

Please join us for a reading and artist talk from poet, writer, and artist Layli Long Soldier. This event will also be broadcast live over the air with KSPC–tune in to 88.7fm or stream online at kspc.org.

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Thursday, February 22, 2024, 4:30 p.m., Rose Hills Theater, Pomona College.

February 27: An Evening with Poet Laureate Ada Limón

Join the United States Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, for an evening of poetry and discussion. Limón, the 24th and current Poet Laureate of the United States, has been called “a Poet Laureate for the 21st Century,” and is interested in exploring “what it looks like to have America in the room.” Originally from Sonoma, California, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. The project includes an anthology of poetry and a collaboration with the National Parks Service on poetry installations within America’s most important natural spaces. The recipient of numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, she has also written a poem that will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft that will be launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024.

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The book component of her signature project, You Are Here, which focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world, will be released this April with Milkweed Editions.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024. Dinner Program, 6 p.m., Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College. Registration required.

February 29: Poetry Reading with Toby Altman

Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Beloit College.

Thursday, February 29, 2024, 4:30 p.m., Crookshank 108, Pomona College.

March 5: Publishing for Creatives: Where Do I Start?

From a box in your garage to the printing press, from your Notes App to the anthology! In this hands-on workshop, Curious Publishing founder Rebecca Ustrell and poet linett luna tovar will guide you through publishing tips, best practices, and exercises for getting your work published.

Rebecca Ustrell is an artist, educator, and documentarian in the Inland Empire of Southern California. In 2018 after a long period of creative burn-out, she leaned into her life-long passion for printed ephemera and founded Curious Publishing, a non-profit artbook publishing company which focuses on archiving stories and creating wealth by supporting queer, BIPOC, and femme creatives through small-run artbooks, zines, and print collections. She is currently the Activist Artist in Residence for the Community Engagement Center at Pitzer College, and Event Coordinator for Museum Arts & Culture at the City of Ontario.

linett luna tovar is an undocumented, queer artist and facilitator based in Pomona, CA. You might also know her as the woman at the Hive’s Scrapyard who knows where all the supplies are (formally, A.D. of Community and Co-Curricular Programming). linett’s writing has been featured in various publications and has performed her original work at The dA Center for the Arts, UCLA, Macalester College, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Museum, among others. She currently performs with LA Playback Theater Co. and is working on her manuscript, Good Sleeper, Bad Dreamer, a bilingual poetry collection. She holds undergraduate degrees in Performing Arts and Anthropology, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024, 7 – 8:30 pm, The Hive. Registration required.

March 6: Pitzer Open Mic

Open to all poets, singers, musicians, and storytellers!

Wednesday March 6, 2024, 7 – 9 p.m., Grove House, Pitzer College.

March 18: Glass Humanities Lecture: Báyò Akómoláfé

Báyò Akómoláfé is a “Passionate about the Preposterous” Poet, Philosopher, Psychologist, and Professor that has been selected as Pitzer College’s 2024 Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecturer. His talk entitled, Sensuous Solidarities: The Slightest Gesture in Necropolitical Deathscapes explores these turbulent times where death is the principal product of the global nation-state order and the need for solidarity has never been more pronounced. Dr. Akomolafe wonders if it is possible to trace out an ethnography of solidarity-making practices and explore if popular expressions of solidarity are extensions of biopolitical and, perhaps, necropolitical orders of control? He turns to the promise of the minor gesture by thinking from the sides, the peripheral (or the peri-feral), and sensitizing us towards speculative, sensuous solidarities.

Akómoláfé is a self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster). His vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope. He is the author of multiple books and essays on matters ranging from the nature of science, the coronavirus pandemic, racism, tricksters, climate chaos, and unschooling.

Monday, March 8, 2024, 4:00 p.m., Broad Center Performance Space, Pitzer College. 

March 20: Four ‘First Novelists’ from the 5Cs

Please join us in this unique celebration of four writers just setting out on remarkable careers, all of whom were recently part of our Claremont creative writing community.

        Francesca Capossela (Trouble the Living, Pomona ‘18)

        David Connor (Oh God, The Sun Goes, Pomona ‘15)

        Julius Taranto (How I Won a Nobel Prize, Pomona ‘12)

        Tyriek White (We Are A Haunting, Pitzer ‘13)

The readings and conversation will be introduced by Pomona Professor Jonathan Lethem and four special “mentor” guests: Charmaine Craig (Pomona visiting professor 2009-2010), Brian Evenson (Cal Arts MFA), Laura Harris (Pitzer), Kevin Dettmar (Pomona).

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 7 p.m., Rose Hills Theater, Pomona College.

March 22: Storytellers Festival

You are invited to the third annual “Storyteller’s Festival”  Film-Song-Story-Art-Fun! We will be featuring local artists, filmmakers, storytellers, vendors and more to Pitzer’s campus!

For more information about the events of the day, please visit our webpage: https://www.pitzer.edu/cec/storytellers-festival/

This one day event is brought to you by Pitzer’s Community Engagement Center, Writing Center,  and the Media Studies for Social Justice, Black People in the Inland Empire classes offered at Pitzer College.

Friday, March 22, 2024, Noon – 6 p.m., Pitzer College

March 25: Poetry Reading with Òscar Moisés Díaz

Òscar Moisés Díaz is a poet-astrologer, film curator, and artist. They’ve exhibited art in places such as the 10th Central American Biennial, International Film Festival of El Salvador, Queens Museum, The Museum of Art El Salvador, and a solo exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Costa Rica. They are an inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project, NYC. They are a member of Tierra Narrative and a contributing editor at Asphalte Magazine. Recent poems can be found in Schlag Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes and Screen Door Review. They run a full-time consulting astrologer practice at cielosueloastrology.com. Díaz will read new and old poems based on dreams. The new poems in particular all engage with medieval Islamic dream dictionaries.

Monday, March 25, 2024, 4:30 pm, Ena Thompson Reading Room, Crookshank 108, Pomona College.

March 26: A Reading with Myriam J. A. Chancy

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of the forthcoming novel Village Weavers (Tin House, June 2024). Her most recent novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a “Best Book of 2021” by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Globe and Mail. What Storm, What Thunder was shortlisted for the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize, and awarded an ABA from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her other work has won the 2011 Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award and has been shortlisted or longlisted for numerous other prizes. Chancy is also the author of several academic monographs and her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone Magazine, Electric Literature, and Guernica. She is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.

Tuesday, March 26, Noon, Hamptom Room, Scripps College.

April 3: A Reading with Rob Magnuson Smith PZ ’91 and Melissa Chadburn

Rob Magnuson Smith PZ ’91 is winner of the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the David Higham Award, and the William Faulkner Award for his debut novel The Gravedigger. His novel Scorper, published by Granta, was called by the Independent as ‘odd, original, darkly comic; Kafka crossed with Flann O’Brien.’ Rob’s third novel Seaweed Rising had its US release in January 2024. Novelist Akhil Sharma described it as ‘truly weird and wonderful.’ Rob is a dual citizen of the US and the UK. Since 2013, he has co-directed the Creative Writing Program at Exeter University in Cornwall.

Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYRB, Paris Review online, and dozens other places. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, was published with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in April 2022 and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award. She was just awarded her Ph.D. from USC’s Creative Writing Program. Melissa is a worker lover and through her own work and literary citizenship strives to upend economic violence. Her mother taught her how to sharpen a pencil with a knife and she’s basically been doing that ever since.

Wednesday, April 3, 2024, 6 p.m., Grove House, Pitzer College

April 9: International Author Talk: Tom Lin

Join us in a conversation with author Tom Lin (PO ‘18) as we engage in a conversation about his experience as an international writer and his debut novel—a western with supernatural elements set in the 1860s. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is about a Chinese American assassin who pursues vengeance after railroad barons kidnap his lover and conscript him into constructing the Central Pacific Railroad. Media has praised the story’s subversion of the white-centric perspective of traditional westerns and its exploration of identity. The novel was awarded the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner. Lunch reception to follow.

Thursday, April 9, 2024. Talk 11 am – 12:30 pm. Lunch Reception 12:30 – 1:30 pm. Benson Auditorium, Pitzer College. RSVP Requested.

April 25: Performance by Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020).  With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay Honey came out in August 2023.

Julian Talamantex Brolaski will be performing its recently released country music at the Benton.

Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Benton Museum of Art’s Art After Hours.

Thursday, April 25, 2024, 7 p.m., Benton Museum of Art, Pomona 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.