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Register for this event here.

Celebrated Nigerian-born writer E.C. Osondu delivers a short-story collection of nimble dexterity and startling originality in his BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning Alien Stories.

These eighteen stories, each centered around an encounter with the unexpected, explore what it means to be an alien. With a nod to the dual meaning of alien as both foreigner and extraterrestrial, Osondu turns familiar science-fiction tropes and immigration narratives on their heads, blending one with the other to call forth a whirlwind of otherness.

With wry observations about society and human nature, in shifting landscapes from Africa to America to outer space and back again, Alien Stories breaks down the concept of foreignness to reveal what unites us all as ‘aliens’ within a complex and interconnected universe.

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E.C. Osondu was born in Nigeria. A winner of the Caine Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and BOA Short Fiction Prize he is the author of the story collection--Voice of America and the novel This House is Not For Sale. His latest book is Alien Stories. He is a professor at Providence College.

Okey Ndibe is the author of the novels Never look an American in the eye: A Memoir of flying turtles, colonial ghost, and the making of a NIgerian American, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, and co-editor (with Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove) of Writers Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa. Janet Maslin of The New York Times as well as Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Mosaic magazine named Foreign Gods, Inc. one of the 10 best books of 2014. The novel was also included in National Public Radio’s list of best books of 2014.

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In this workshop, Larissa will share a variety of approaches to writing from images and visual art, and through fragment, weave essayistic creative nonfiction from stellateing points of observation and relationality. Participants are encouraged to arrive at the workshop with an image (like a personal snapshot, family or archival photograph) or piece of art (like a drawing, painting, sculpture, or piece of architecture) to work from.

Cost: $100

This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.

Please click here first to complete a required form, then submit your payment here.

This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.

Dantiel W. Montiz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick and has been hailed as "must-read" by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzefeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a 2020 Lannan Fiction Fellow and the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of a 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at the University of Oxford, the Nordic Africa Institute, and Vassar College. She has taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and serves as an assistant professor of fiction at Emerson College.

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Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles which inspires her writing. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, The Acentos Review and Huizache. Her fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature by Bilingual Press and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse by Lost Horse Press. She received a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and was selected a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her debut short story collection, Chola Salvation, was published April 30, 2021 by Arte Público Press.

Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection Love War Stories is a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She has published fiction in the Boston Review, Obsidian, Kweli, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is a contributing arts editor for the Boston Review, where she acquires fiction. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. To learn more about Ivelisse, visit: www.ivelisserodriguez.com.

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In this workshop, Yiyun will talk about how stories about human relations are made of patterns rather than events and discuss how to apply ‘geometry’ in both a temporal and spatial sense – concepts such as triangulation, mirroring, invisible lines, beautiful symmetry – to create stories that transgress the ordinary.

“Some people hold the view that a story in contrast to a novel is an étude. I resist that notion. A story can be as big, as epic, as symphonic as a novel. And a story is never just a slice, or a sliver of life, but as complex, murky and unresolved as life.

To read a great story is to be absorbed into an entire world that is made of many lives. But a story is limited in its space and its word count.

In my own reading and writing stories, I have come up with a shorthand to distinguish an okay story or good story from a great story.

In every great story, there are at least 3 stories. Sometimes three stories are not enough. Why don’t we say 5 stories? In fact, why don’t we shoot for 7.

It may sound fancy or crazy to work 5 or 7 stories into the space of a single story. But I not only think it is possible. But more importantly, it is necessary if one wants to write a great story.

There are many ways to make multiple stories into one story. I'm going to talk about one way which is to think about geometry in story.” - Yiyun LI

Cost: $100

This craft talk is exclusively for BIPOC writers.

Please click here first to complete a required form, then submit your payment near the bottom of the page found here.