The Creative Writing MFA at Rutgers-Camden is thrilled to announce our second public reading! We’re happy to announce that YZ Chin will be joining us as this month’s headlining guest reader!
The reading is open to the public, so come by for an evening of good words & good company (and snacks!) with some of the finest emerging writers in the Philly/South Jersey area. Readings for December and beyond are in the works, so stay tuned!
This month's line-up:
YZ CHIN’s debut book of fiction, Though I Get Home, was published by Feminist Press in April 2018, and was the inaugural winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. It earned a starred review from Kirkus, who called the book “haunting, surprising, and rebellious.” Publisher’s Weekly called it a “beautiful, visceral collection.” Chin is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: deter (dancing girl press, 2013) and In Passing (Anomalous Press, 2019). Her story “To Dance Is Feline” was included on Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for best horror story of 2017, and her work is forthcoming in the Harvard Review and Somesuch Stories. Born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia, Chin now lives in New York, where she works as a software engineer by day, and writes by night, cheered on by her husband and cat (separate beings).
ALLISON CASEY is a current MFA Creative Writing candidate at Rutgers University–Camden. A New Jersey native, Allison received her BA in English and Certificate in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. While her first and second loves are her cat and coffee, respectively, poetry comes in at a close third. Her work has been published in Occulum Journal, Moonchild Magazine, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
ROY GRAHAM is a writer from New York whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Motherboard and, once, on the back of several million Chipotle bags. He received his BA from NYU, where he studied fiction. After two years working in the videogame industry in Los Angeles, he dreads returning to true winter.
JAE LEE is a South Korean poet and a recent graduate of New York University, where she was awarded the Judith Lobel Arkin Prize by the Academy of American Poets and received her B.A. in English.
About THOUGH I GET HOME:
"A haunting, surprising, and rebellious collection that contains multitudes." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: a grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains, a consort finds herself a new assignment, and a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl—and frustrated writer—transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp.
YZ Chin
Interlinked stories trace postcolonial memory and political dissidence across the globe.