Fall Convergence
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Fall Convergence: Conversation and Connection
September 27-28, 2024
University of Washington, Bothell
Off-site reading in Seattle
Free and Open to the public
The Fall Convergence is a yearly gathering of local and international writers, artists, and thinkers dedicated to an interdisciplinary exploration of a vital contemporary theme. This free event marks the beginning of our academic year and draws students, alumni, and members of the artistic and literary communities in Seattle and beyond.
For this, our 12th convergence, we are featuring three pairings of our faculty with authors with whom they wish to be in “conversation and connection,” as well as an author pairing that showcases our longstanding collaboration and connection with Essay Press.
We will also showcase our collaboration with the MFA student-led Gamut reading series, which will host an offsite reading on Friday, September 27, 2024.
Current Schedule
Friday September 27, 2024
Off-Site Reading hosted by Gamut
Location: Vermillion Gallery, 1508 11th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
6–8:30pm Details Forthcoming
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Convergence Panels
Location: North Creek Event Center (NCEC), UW Bothell
10:30–11:30 am: Morning coffee and generative writing workshop
11:30 am–12:30 pm: Lunch provided
12:30–1:30 pm: Amaranth Borsuk & Mita Mahato
1:45–2:45 pm: Ching-In Chen & Juan Carlos Reyes
2:45–3:15 pm: Catered coffee break
3:15–4:15 pm: Jeanne Heuving & Eleni Stecopoulos
4:30–5:30 pm: Sarah Rose Nordgren & Ronaldo Wilson
Keynote Presenters:
Mita Mahato
Mita Mahato is the author and artist of Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing, 2024) and the collection In Between (Pleiades, 2017). Her poetry comix have been published in PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, and her practice has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Short Run Seattle, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. A career educator, she teaches comix and poetry at all levels and currently lives in Seattle.
Juan Carlos Reyes
Juan Carlos Reyes‘s debut fiction collection, Three Alarm Fire, is forthcoming with Hinton Publishing. His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among others. His novella A Summer’s Lynching won the Quarterly West prize in 2017. He has been the recipient of the Gar LaSalle Artist Trust Storyteller Award, a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, and a Jack Straw Writers Fellowship, among others. He received his MFA from The University of Alabama, is a former board member of Seattle City of Literature, and currently serves as an Associate Professor of creative writing at Seattle University.
Eleni Stecopoulos
Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic who frequently writes on literature and other arts in relation to history, medicine, (auto)ethnography, ecology, and social and cultural resistance. Her book of critical-lyric essays, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, is out from Nightboat this fall. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves”; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called “riveting . . . rare beauties.” Stecopoulos’s writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, [φρμκ], Best American Experimental Writing, Open Space (SFMOMA), In Insomnia: An Anthology, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, ecopoetics, Viz. Inter-Arts, Second Stutter, The Capilano Review, and Harvard Review, among many other venues. In recent years she has given talks on poetry and psychotherapy at the University of Plymouth; on poetics and experimental ethnography at the University of Texas, Austin; on “outsider writing” at the University of Chicago; and on translation and healing at the Paros Symposium in Tinos, Greece. Stecopoulos received her MFA from the University of Virginia and PhD in English from the University at Buffalo. After years of teaching at the University of San Francisco and Bard College, she now works with writers as an independent editor, manuscript consultant, and mentor. Born in New York City, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Sarah Rose Nordgren is an American poet, writer, teacher, and cultural organizer. She is the author of four books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), which earned the Essay Press Book Prize, as well as the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) and Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; and the chapbook The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Nordgren holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from University of Cincinnati where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Nordgren lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina where she teaches poetry, serves as Emerging Poet Feature editor for 32 Poems, and is the Founding Director of The School for Living Futures, an experimental, interdisciplinary organization dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future.
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022); Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); and Carmelina, Figures: An Artist’s Book (Wendy’s Subway, 2021). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. The recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo, and is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).
Previous Fall Convergences
To view previous Fall Convergences, please visit our Fall Convergence Archive.
Access and Accommodation
This event will take advantage of auto-generated live captioning in Zoom. CART and ASL interpretation are available by request at least ten days in advance.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@uw.edu.