The Sixth Annual Alumni Poetry Reading Series featuring Michelle Dominque Burk '16, Dai George '10, Carlie Hoffman '16, and Ricardo Alberto Maldonado ’08.
Organized by Timothy Donnelly, Writing.
Michelle Dominique Burk’s ’16 debut collection, No Crying in the Garden, was recently published by Barnes & Noble Press. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2016 and her PhD from the University of Houston’s Literature & Creative Writing Program in 2020. A 2021 Houston Poet Laureate finalist, she is the recipient of the 2019 Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of Houston and a Narrative Magazine “30 Below” prizewinner. Currently teaching English and Advanced Creative Writing at The Field School in Washington D.C., she is also at work on a socio-cultural archival project called the Gentle Blackness Project, which seeks to capture and showcase the beauty, grace, and excellence of African-American history.
Dai George '10 is a poet, novelist and critic from Cardiff, now living in London. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia in 2010. His first poetry collection, The Claims Office, was an Evening Standard book of the year and his second, titled Karaoke King, was published by Seren in June 2021. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The White Review, and Islands Are But Mountains: New Poetry from the United Kingdom. He works as reviews editor for Poetry London, and his first novel, The Counterplot, is available as an Audible Original.
Carlie Hoffman’s ’16 debut poetry collection, This Alaska, was published by Four Way Books this fall. Her second collection is forthcoming next year. A poet and translator, her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Jewish Currents, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. A lecturer in Creative Writing at Purchase College-SUNY and the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal, she received her MFA in 2016 from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the recipient of a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship, a Philip Guston Writing Fellowship, and served as poetry editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado ’08 was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Published by Four Way Books last year, his first collection of poems, The Life Assignment, was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and was featured in Remezcla’s Best Books by Latine or Latin American Authors. Maldonado is also the co-editor of the bilingual anthology Puerto Rico en mi corazón and the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s collection Collateral / Colaterales. He is currently at work on El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, an online archive of Puerto Rican poets funded by the Mellon Foundation and the University of Houston’s USLDH, and is managing director at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
