At this year’s Arts and Humanities Graduate Exhibition, on view June 8-25 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, students in history, performance studies and English as well as design and art will take part. A free, public opening celebration will take place June 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. Art history students will present their research the following day. In all, 30 Master of Fine Arts, Master of Arts and doctoral students are participating. 

Lucy Corin, a UC Davis Department of English professor of creative writing, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She plans to use the fellowship to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Les and Rae. She is one of eight fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.

“(The book) is about a couple who respond to current cultural pressures differently — one joins an underground gun group and one sneaks away into the woods at the edge of their neighborhood,” she said.

Kirk Colvin spent a year as U.S. Coast Guard attaché to the American Embassy during the final months of the brutal Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime in the 1980s. His time there informed his novel Bloodless Coup, winner of the Maurice Prize for Fiction. The $10,000 prize is awarded to UC Davis alumni and was established in 2005 by bestselling author John Lescroart in honor of his father.

Attention unpublished Aggie alumni novelists! After a yearlong hiatus, the Maurice Prize for Fiction is back — and bigger than ever before. The $10,000 award, doubled in size this year, recognizes the best book-length prose fiction written by a UC Davis graduate who has not yet published or been accepted for publication by the contest deadline. Manuscript submissions are being accepted through July 15 for the 2022 contest.

The culmination of two or more years and a lifetime of experience and exploration by UC Davis students, “The Arts & Humanities Graduate Exhibition” offers new ways to understand the world, ourselves and the issues we face. We spent time with three students from art studio, music and design to learn about their journeys of creating works that are in the exhibition.

The UC Davis Creative Writing Program in the Department of English will present online readings March 2 and 3 — one by a star of the literary world, and another by three UC Davis alumni with newly published books. In April, three lyric and narrative poets who create long-form works will take part in a conversation and give readings. All the readings are co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library.

Alumni share new novels

Three graduates of the Creative Writing Program will return to campus virtually March 2 at 4:30 p.m. to read from their books published last year.

Award-Winning Authors, Faculty Readings, Interdisciplinary Student Works on Tap

The UC Davis Creative Writing Series kicks off 2021 with readings by acclaimed visiting writers Jess Arndt and Carmen Maria Machado, a collaboration between music and writing students, and a showcase of new works by faculty members. All events are at 4:30 p.m., free and accessible on Zoom unless otherwise noted.

The Creative Writing Program is part of the English department in the College of Letters and Science.

The Creative Writing Program of the UC Davis Department of English is expanding its reading series with online and in-person readings by visiting writers, creative writing Master of Fine Arts candidates, lecturers in the Creative Writing Program, and projects created in collaboration with art and music students.  

UC Davis College of Letters and Science graduate students aren’t letting the lack of a physical space stop them from celebrating and sharing their work with the public. The Arts & Humanities 2020 Graduate Exhibition, usually held at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, will instead take place on the museum website May 28–June 28.

Seven College of Letters and Science faculty members are among the professors honored by the UC Davis Academic Senate and Academic Federation for their teaching, research and public service.