UC RIVERSIDE MFA STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS READ FROM THEIR WORK

Join us as professors and students from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts MFA read from their work. Readers include: Tom Lutz, Charmaine Craig, Katie Ford, Robin Russin, Bernardita Garcia, Ashanti Anderson, Alicia Mosely, Lorelei Baughman, and Emily Margaret Wells.

Tom Lutz is the author, most recently, of And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life of Travel and Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World: Wandering the Globe from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar. He is the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books.

Robin Uriel Russin is a professor of screenwriting and playwriting in the Department of Theatre, Film & Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside. He has written, produced and directed for film, TV and the theater, including the box office hit On Deadly Ground; America’s Most Wanted; and Vital Signs on ABC, where he was Senior Producer. Robin is co-author of the books Screenplay: Writing the Picture, now in its second edition, and Naked Playwriting. His stories, articles and reviews have been appeared in Script Magazine, Verdad Magazine, Connotation Press, Harvard Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The American Oxonian, Shofar, and elsewhere. A Rhodes Scholar, Robin has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, Rhode Island School of Design, and UCLA. His play, The Face in the Reeds, recently premiered in an extended run at the Ruskin Group Theatre, where he initiated and leads a workshop for emerging and established local playwrights. His original one-hour pilot script about King David, Beloved, was adapted by ABC TV as Of Kings and Prophets. Robin is currently directing the indie feature, When I Sing.

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review and The Norton Introduction for Literature, and she is currently serving as a judge for the 2016 National Book Awards. Her fourth book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press is 2018. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program.

Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. A former actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard University and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her first novel, The Good Men (Riverhead), was a national bestseller translated into six languages.

Bernardita García is a twenty-nine year-old Chilean journalist who is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. For the last two years, she has worked as a ghostwriter. In 2016, her children’s book “La Ballena Jorobada” (The Humpback Whale) was given an award by the Municipality of Santiago, Chile. She's a paws-and-tails lover and was the coordinator of Chile’s largest animal rights campaign: #NoSonMuebles. Her writing is influenced by Latin American social changes, women’s struggle and her generation’s quest for its own identity.  

Lorelei Baughman has spent her life in California, with interludes in France and the San Juan Islands. She’s been in sales, driven a taxi, and owns a business. Now that she’s writing, she looks back most fondly on driving the taxi. She writes short stories, and graduated from UC Riverside in 2015 with a BA in Creative Writing. She loves teaching almost as much as she loves writing, and has conducted a Creative Writing class at the Chino Women’s Correctional Facility. She has been published in Bravura and Mosaic. Her stories are about ordinary people in Las Vegas and Nebraska, but she secretly wants to write about angels and genii wielding scimitars up in the ozone, inflicting their whims on the grocery clerks and civil engineers below.  She lives in Temecula, California with her husband and dogs.

Ashanti Anderson earned her B.S. in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana. Before officially deciding to pursue her goals as a writer, she was a research assistant in a lab that studied the effects of music on the cognition of individuals with dementia. She has published poetry, creative non-fiction, essays, and research articles through various print and electronic publications. Her interests include psychology, theology, cooking, and nature, and she usually (sometimes unintentionally) incorporates at least two of those into every piece that she writes.

Alicia Mosley was born in Santa Cruz, California and spent most of her life with one foot in Northern California and the other in Southern. In her writing, she is interested in exploring the ways people straddle the intersections of place, culture, and time. Alicia currently lives in Riverside with her four children and is working on her first novel.

Emily Margaret Wells writes true stories (journalism) and obliquely true stories (fiction). She is working on a novel about art, family and religion, which she plans to complete during the MFA at UC Riverside. Formerly a newspaper reporter, fashion model and ballet dancer, she lives and works with a nameless cat.