Award-Winning Writers Read Works at UC Davis

The Creative Writing Reading Series at UC Davis continues in 2019 with three diverse and accomplished authors: a 2018 National Book Award finalist; a writer who has produced short stories, a memoir, a novel and graphic novel; and a winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

The series is organized by the Department of English creative writing program in the College of Letters and Science. All readings are at 7 p.m. in the Peter J. Shields Library and are free and open to the public.

Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth

Tuesday, Jan. 15 – Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the short story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance, the novel Vacation, the graphic novel I, Parrot and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. An associate professor at the University of Texas, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes. Unferth founded the Pen-City Writers, a creative writing program at a maximum-security prison in Texas.

Janel Brinkley, creative writing
Jamel Brinkley

Thursday, Feb. 7 – Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train and American Short Fiction. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

Crystal Wilkinson, creative writing
Crystal Wilkinson

Thursday, March 7 – Crystal Wilkinson’s debut novel, The Birds of Opulence, received the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her other works include the short-story collections Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street. Wilkinson is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky.