We are delighted to announce the return of Columbia Selects, the Writing Program’s storied alumni reading series! The series has relaunched online for the 2021-22 season.
Join us Thursday, February 3, at 7 pm, for our fabulous lineup:
L. A. Johnson '15 is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press). She received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and is currently pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she is a Provost’s Fellow. The winner of the 2021 Rumi Prize in Poetry, her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, and other journals. Find her online at http://www.la-johnson.com.
Michael Hanna '19 is a lawyer and writer. He traded the nearly endless skies of Oklahoma for a tiny apartment in Manhattan, after stops in San Francisco and Hong Kong. He’s writing a book about the failure of indigent defense in Oklahoma and what that failure says about the American approach to criminal justice. He is philosophically opposed to the fork as an eating utensil.
Carolyn Jack '16 has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, an Honorable Mention in the 90th Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, The Westchester Review’s 2016 Flash Fiction Contest Prize, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers’ 2016 Meringoff Prize for Fiction. Jack’s stories have appeared in publications such as the Blue Mountain Review, ALSCW’s Literary Matters, The Westchester Review, Pen + Brush, and Great Lakes Review.
What is Columbia Selects? Columbia Selects is an alumni reading series hosted by the Columbia MFA Writing Program. These fresh talents are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you'll be reading in 2023! Columbia Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke '00 and Emily Austin '10.