February Reading Series

SAFTA Presents February Reading Series

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce the guests for the February installment of our virtual reading series. This event will take place on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 on Zoom (http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress, password: safta) from 7-8 PM EST.

Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, which was selected by Stephanie Burt for a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and a BA from Bennington College. The winner of Breakwater Review’s 2016 Peseroff Prize, her poems have appeared in journals including No Tokens, Tinderbox, and Bodega. She has received support from the Community of Writers, the Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference, and will be a 2021-2022 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Ranjani Murali is an Indian writer who lives in suburban Chicago. She received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, following which she won the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for emerging Indian poets; fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown; and the inaugural Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award. Her first book of poems Blind Screens won the Almost Island inaugural manuscript prize and her second book, Clearly You Are ESL, won the Editors’ Choice Award in The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective’s manuscript competition and was published in 2020.

Jeannine Ouellette is the author of The Part That Burns, a memoir in fragments. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Narrative, North American Review, Masters Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Writer’s Chronicle, among others, and in several anthologies including Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men and Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Her work has been supported by Millay Colony for the Arts and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. She teaches writing through the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Elephant Rock, an independent creative writing program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel.