UW Castalia
Castalia is a monthly reading series featuring graduate students, faculty, and alumni from the University of Washington MFA program. Use the “Tickets” button above to register for the Zoom meeting.
About the Readers
Reggie Kent (he/they) hails from Singapore. Prior to UW, he spent his time completing a Master of Arts in English Literature at Nanyang Technological University. He moved towards the academe after a brief stint of working in an ad agency. He figured out pretty quick it was more fulfilling to direct his writing creatively instead of towards advertising the latest Domino’s Pizza. His creative work focuses on queer forms and the gay experience. If you are interested, the story he is reading from today recently got published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (QLRS).
Emily Giangiulio is a writer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, currently living in Seattle as a first-year MFA student in prose at the University of Washington. She graduated last year from Bard College with a dual B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Written Arts, where her long-form fiction received the Mary McCarthy Prize and her political ecology research the Franz Boas/Ruth Benedict Prize. Prior to UW, she worked in varying capacities at a literary journal, an NYC literary agency, an actuarial firm (of all places), and an old school Italian deli.
Maya Sonenberg has been on the prose faculty at the University of Washington since 1993, and is the author of three story collections. The most recent, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, has received the 2021 Sullivan Prize in short fiction and will appear in fall 2022. Her nonfiction has appeared in chapbook form from PANK Books and in numerous literary journals. This past summer saw the publication of a long essay on choreographer Merce Cunningham’s iconic dance Summerspace in Gulf Coast. This ongoing project on Cunningham’s work has been supported by Velocity Dance Center (Seattle) and the Merce Cunningham Trust.
Jennifer Berney writes to explore the human state of longing. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Offing, Brevity, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Jennifer grew up on the East Coast, but spent many summers falling in love with the Pacific Northwest, where the trees, mountains, and water seemed to put all worries in perspective. She has made a home in Olympia, where she lives with her partner, two sons, a corgi, a mutt, forty-one chickens, and many honeybees. Jennifer holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Washington, and teaches writing at South Puget Sound Community College.
