UW Castalia MFA Program Presents: Monthly Readings
Join Hugo House in welcoming back Castalia—University of Washington MFA program's monthly reading series featuring graduate students, faculty, and alumni. Showcasing published and unpublished drafts of work by authors from a variety of disciplines, professional backgrounds, and age demographics, Castalia offers authors a platform for community reading while putting their work in conversation with other voices, styles, concerns, and identities. The first half of the reading features three student authors, and the second half one alum and one faculty member.
Liv Vessenes
LIV VESSENES is a sophomore at University of Washington, where she studies math and creative writing. She fell in love with theater at Bainbridge Performing Arts in elementary school. Since then, several of her plays have been produced, and her poetry published. Her other interests include fashion design and dance.
Maya Sonenberg
MAYA SONENBERG’s story collection Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters received the 2022 Sullivan Prize in short fiction and was published in August 2022. Previous books and chapbooks include Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize), Voices from the Blue Hotel, 26 Abductions, and After the Death of Shostakovich Père. Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Electric Literature, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and many other literary journals. The daughter of two painters, she was raised in New York City, and studied with Annie Dillard at Wesleyan University and with Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Meredith Steinbach at Brown University, where she received her MFA. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and lives in Seattle.
Rachael Walker
RACHAEL MARIE WALKER (she/they) is a Seattle-based writer who fell in love with words, music, and their collisions in the weeds of Virginia. Rachael enjoys writing poetry and prose about queerness, bodies, complicating womanhood, and ideas of home. Rachael's work has been selected for awards including the Bill Hallberg award and the Melanie Hook Rice prize, both for creative nonfiction. Outside of writing and reading, Rachael enjoys long walks, bicycling, painting, and baking. They tweet @rachaelwalking.
Tenzin Sangpo
TENZIN SANGPO is a Tibetan refugee who grew up in Nepal and India. He initially studied physics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, before transferring to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. There he received a B.A. in Creative Writing with a minor in English Literature. Tenzin's essays explore the parallels between modern physics and Buddhism, his fiction the trauma of exile, the legacy of genocide, and the wisdom in compassion. His writings have appeared in Perceptions, Catch, Quiver, and Applied Physics Letters. He is an M.F.A candidate in Creative Writing-Prose at the University of Washington – Seattle.
Jared Jones
JARED JONES is a recipient of the University of West Georgia’s Kay Magenheimer Poetry Prize and an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has work forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review. In his spare time, Jared enjoys soccer, video games, and writing unfinished screenplays.
