Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series Spring 2024 Schedule Announced

Myriam Gurba will read from her most recent book, Creep: Accusations and Confessions. Gurba has been described as “the most fearless writer in America.” (This event is cosponsored by the MALAS Program and the Instructionally Related Activities Fund.)

Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the essay collection, Creep, the true crime memoir Mean, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. O, The Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, Time, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. She lives in Pasadena, California.

Marta Balcewicz will read from her debut novel, Big Shadow, which has been described as “Smart, ironic, and tender, with prose as sharp as a scam.”

Marta Balcewicz is the author of Big Shadow (Book*hug Press, 2023) and various short stories, essays, and poems that have appeared in journals including Catapult, Tin House online, and Hazlitt. She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022. She is at work on her second novel.

Each semester, thanks to an endowment created by her family and friends, the Laurie Okuma Memorial Reading honors the memory of SDSU alumna, Laurie Matsueda Okuma. The spring 2024 Okuma Author, Erika Hayasaki, will share excerpts from her recent book, Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family. Hayasaki has been lauded as “a master storyteller.”

Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California. She is the author of The Death Class: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster), and Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family (Algonquin Books, Hachette). Somewhere sisters was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting. Her recent longform stories appear in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic, Elle, New York Magazine & The Cut. Formerly a national writer for the Los Angeles Times, she’s now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Literary Journalism Program.

Wayne Miller will read from his most recent works, including the poetry collection, We the Jury, which has been praised as “incisive and deeply personal, plumbing complex human questions… in ways that feel both current and enduring.” This event is cosponsored by the Instructionally Related Activities Fund. 

Wayne Miller has published five poetry collections: We the Jury, which is currently shortlisted for the Colorado Book Award; Post-, which won the Colorado Book Award and the Rilke Prize; The City, Our City, which was shortlisted for the Rilke Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Book of Props; and Only the Senses Sleep, which won the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He has co-translated two books by Moikom Zeqo—Zodiac, which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation, and I Don’t Believe in Ghosts—and he has co-edited three books: Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (w/ Kurowski and Prufer), Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master (w/ Lento), and New European Poets (w/ Prufer). Wayne teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-curates the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.

Joshua Burton will read from his debut full-length poetry collection, Grace Engine, and answer questions from attendees. Grace Engine has been celebrated as “[a] collection [that] will move you with its honesty and courage. It will lift you. It will light a way through the darkness.” 

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Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press.

Katie Farris will read from her most recent publications including the poetry collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, which “rings with love and language” and has been lauded as a “truly wise, unforgettable, delight-full book.” 

Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), which was shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, Thirteen Intimacies, and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). Most recently she is winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, most recently, The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear, Translations of Lydmila and Boris Khersonsky. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.