Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Join us for a reading with novelist Mona Awad and poet Mai Der Vang. Awad’s latest novel, All’s Well, is a searing indictment on society’s collective refusal to witness and believe female pain. Vang’s Yellow Rain, a 2022 Pen America Literary Award finalist, is a work of documentary, poetry and collage that calls out the erasure of a history, and the silencing of Hmong refugees. A book signing and reception will follow.

Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently in development for film with Jenni Konner and New Regency Productions. Awad's first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, TIME, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University. Her new novel, All’s Well, has been named a best or most anticipated book of summer by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads and many more.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She was also the co-editor of the anthology How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011). She has been an assistant professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Fresno State University since 2019.

The 2022 Juniper Literary Festival is a program of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers’ Juniper Initiative and made possible with generous support from Mass Cultural Council; UMass Arts Council; College of Humanities & Fine Arts; Department of English; Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Women of Color Leadership Network; Arts Extension Service; Office of the Provost and Graduate School.