UNCW Library is proud to support the UNCW Department of Creative Writing's 2024 Writers' Week.
Find more information about Writers' Week 2024.
Featured Speakers
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett, he/him, is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming The Morphologist (Milkweed, 2026) — as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by the NY Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in Poetry, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, 32 Poems, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Nation and The Sun.
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Time Magazine. She teaches at Columbia University.
From our collection:
Sarah Domet
Sarah Domet is the author of The Guineveres and the craft book 90 Days to Your Novel. Her second novel, Earthshine, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.
Kristin Emanuel
Kristin Emanuel holds an MFA from the University of Kansas where she studied eco-fabulism and the comics poetry movement. She is now a PhD candidate researching visual poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a 2024 finalist for the Dean's Award for Graduate Research Excellence. Her latest poems and comics have appeared in Shenandoah, Boston Review, and RHINO. She has a blackout poem forthcoming in Black Warrior Review and a craft essay forthcoming in Blackbird.
Diamond Forde
Diamond Forde (she/her) is the author of Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2019), a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and the forthcoming collection The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Callaloo, Obsidian and elsewhere. You can find out more at her website: www.diamondforde.com
Janay Nachel Frazier
Janay Frazier is an Assistant Art Director, with over 9 years of experience across non-profit, art direction, creative marketing services and design production in the publishing industry. She is also an adjunct professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Some of her proudest moments have been designing covers for Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming and the NYT bestseller Humanity Archive by Jermaine Fowler. Janay has designed for Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and more. She believes she was created to create and feels most at home curating design projects that unite the concepts of legacy and storytelling.
Justin Torres
Justin Torres is the author of the “shimmering, fable-like novel” (Washington Post) Blackouts, winner of the 2023 National Book Award, and the instant contemporary queer classic We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages and adapted into a feature film. Marking the arrival of a new voice in American letters, We the Animals presents readers with a moving coming-of-age story, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding likened to the “early work of Jeffrey Eugenides and Sandra Cisneros.” Celebrated for his distinctly lyrical style, Torres weaves truth and fiction, blending genres as he explores queer art, love, lineage, life, and death—and the multifaceted dynamics between family, friends, mentors, and strangers—through narrative. Pushing the boundaries of form and modern storytelling, Torres is an essential and urgent voice in fiction and queer canons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. He is at work on his new novel.
From our collection:
Tessa Fontaine
Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS, a New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post. THE RED GROVE, her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine, and is currently longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, and more. Tessa runs creative Accountability Workshops and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
MC Hyland
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, and the author of over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books and two full-length books of poems: THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010). MC's third book, a collection of very short essays called The Dead and the Living and the Bridge, is forthcoming from Meekling Press in 2025. They live in St. Paul, MN with their partner and frequent collaborator, Jeff Peterson.