Join us for a summer faculty reading:

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/4th Estate), winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories (2018, Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow (Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing), a Wallace Stegner Fellow (Stanford University), and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation and Loghaven Artist Residency (Aslan Foundation). Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he divides his time between Iowa City and New York.

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received grants from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He has been a featured storyteller on The Moth, and has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the University of Maryland, the George Washington University, Murray State University, and the University of California – Berkeley. In 2009, he moved to Korea and reunited with his birth family after 30 years of separation.

He is the author of two novels: THE LOST PRAYERS OF RICKY GRAVES (Little A: 2017) and REPRIEVE (William Morrow/Harper Collins and BloomsburyUK: 2021), which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Library Journal, and Crimereads, and was a Fall 2021 Book Pick by The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, O Quarterly, Entertainment Weekly, and the TODAY show, among others. His third novel, THE GRAND IMPOSTORS, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins.

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