Cambridge Common Writers

What The Universe Is: Boston Gordon and Tommy Archuleta
2021-04-08 20:00 - 21:30 (America/New_York) | Online Zoom Event
Boston Gordon (Poetry, January 2015) is a poet and visual designer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They run the You Can’t Kill A Poet reading series – which highlights queer and trans identified writers in Philadelphia. Boston earned their MFA in Poetry through Lesley University. They received a Leeway Foundation Art & Change grant in 2017. They have previously been published in such places as Tinderbox, PRISM International, Guernica and American Poetry Review.

Tommy Archuleta is a mental health counselor and substance abuse counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. Most recently his work has appeared in the New England Review, Guesthouse, Snapdragon, El Palacio, and the Poem-a-Day series sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. He lives and writes on the Cochiti Reservation.

This Zoom reading is free and open to the public.

Watercress: Story Time with Andrea Wang and Jason Chin
2021-04-10 11:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Join us for a special story time with Andrea Wang (WFYP, June 2011) and Jason Chin to celebrate the release of their new picture book, Watercress!

Andrea Wang tells a moving autobiographical story of a child of immigrants discovering and connecting with her heritage, illustrated by award winning author and artist Jason Chin, working in an entirely new style, inspired by Chinese painting techniques. An author’s note in the back shares Andrea’s childhood experience with her parents.

Andrea Wang is the award-winning author of The Nian Monster and Magic Ramen: The Story of Momofuku Ando. She was inspired to write Watercress by her experience growing up in rural Ohio as a child of Chinese immigrants. Andrea holds an M.S. in Environmental Science and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing for Young People. She lives in Colorado with her family.

Jason Chin is a celebrated author and illustrator of children’s books. His book Grand Canyon was awarded a Caldecott Honor, a Sibert Honor, and the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award. He is the author and illustrator of Your Place in the Universe, which Kirkus called “A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge”, as well as other acclaimed nonfiction titles—Coral Reefs, Redwoods, Gravity, and Island: A Story of the Galapagos—which have received numerous starred reviews and other accolades. He lives in Vermont with his wife and children.

Poetry Reading -- Jennifer LeBlanc's "Descent"
2021-04-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Online Zoom Event
Jennifer LeBlanc (Poetry, June 2012) earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Descent is her first full-length book, and individual poems have been published in journals such as The Adirondack Review, CAIRN, The Main Street Rag, and Melusine. Jennifer was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and works in the English Department at Tufts University.

The MSU Filmetry Festival: Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic
2021-04-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Event
The MSU Filmetry Festival is an annual collaborative art-making endeavor that pairs filmmakers with poets to create exciting new pieces of work. Now entering its 3rd year, co-founders Cindy Hunter Morgan and Pete Johnston are thrilled to once again invite filmmakers to synthesize and adapt poetic work into film. Their hope is that through this collaboration, both artistic partners can witness not just an adaptation of a written piece into audiovisual media, but the transformation of the original piece into something wholly new.

This year, the poems will be selected from the newly published anthology Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Eileen Cleary (Poetry, June 2016) and Christine Jones (Poetry, January 2014). 20 filmmakers will be invited to partner with poets to create their new work.

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Seminar and Workshop with Steven Cramer
2021-04-15 18:30 - 21:00 | Online Zoom Event
In this workshop, led by poet and professor Steven Cramer (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty), some of the great poetic influences (think John Keats and Wallace Stevens, or Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich) will be explored and two prompts will be provided to inspire you to invite influence into your work. Steven Cramer’s sixth poetry collection, Listen, was published in 2020 by MadHat Press. He founded and now teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Writers Place with Kevin Prufer, Wayne Miller, and Katie Manning
2021-04-16 20:00 - 21:00 | Online Zoom Event
Kevin Prufer (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty) is the author of seven books of poetry and the editor of numerous anthologies, the most recent of which is How He Loved Them (Four Way Books), winner of the Julie Suk Award and long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Prufer is also Co-Curator of the Unsung Masters Series, and Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. Among Prufer’s awards and honors are four Pushcart prizes and multiple Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.

Brookline Poetry Series with Steven Cramer and Nathan McClain
2021-04-18 14:00 - 16:00 | Online Event
Steven Cramer’s (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty) sixth poetry collection, Listen, was published in 2020 by MadHat Press. He is the author of five previous collections, most recently Clangings (2012) and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was named an Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Recipient of two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. His poems and prose have recently appeared in Poetry Northwest, Zocalo Public Square, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, and The Critical Flame. He teaches at Hampshire College.

A reading from Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival
2021-04-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Event
In April 2021, Salem, MA will be the epicenter of contemporary American poetry, offering rare opportunities to hear the nation’s best poets read and discuss their work in intimate and engaging forums. Join Eileen Cleary (Poetry, June 2016), Steven Cramer (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty), Christine Jones (Poetry, January 2014), and Kyle Potvin as they read from the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic. The festival was co-founded by Cindy Hunter Morgan (Poetry).

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival is a biennial poetry festival, showcasing poetry readings and workshops, a small press and literary fair, panels, poetry slams, visual arts, and open-air performances. Panel topics range broadly from the state of poetry, poetry and gender, book publishing, and modernism in contemporary art. The festival also hosts the Student Day of Poetry, a poetry field trip for middle and high school students, who engage in writing-generative workshops with the region’s top poets and educators. Nearly 300 local and nationally known poets engage with thousands of attendees each festival.

Due to COVID-19, the 2021 Massachusetts will take place in a virtual-hybrid format with the majority of events offered virtually and a select number of events offered in Salem, MA. All in-person events will have the option for attendees to participate virtually.

CCW Poetry Open Mic featuring Jennifer LeBlanc
2021-04-22 19:30 - 20:30 | Online Zoom Event
CCW Poetry Open Mic with featured poet Jennifer LeBlanc (Poetry, June 2012), author of Descent (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

Join on Thursday, April 22 at 7:30pm Eastern to share your verse! We have 20 slots available, so sign-up here.

Kevin Prufer - THE ART OF FICTION and Craig Morgan Teicher - WELCOME TO SONNETVILLE, NEW JERSEY
2021-04-22 20:00 - 21:00 | Online Zoom Event
In this his eighth collection of poetry (and fifth with Four Way Books), Prufer’s (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty) career-spanning talent for estranging the familiar—and also for recording the unthinkable with eerie directness—recurs, enhanced and transformed by the collection’s meta-level attention to the role of fiction in our civic lives. Prufer describes, often through personae, a near future, tracing there the political gambit of Fake News and the role of the imagination in our self-understanding (whether it’s cogent or delusional). Via both satire and direct address (to the point of reader-squeamishness), Prufer aims to understand the ugly-casual atmosphere of our often racialized, pervasive distrust. The Art of Fiction fundamentally understands that fictions are deployed to divide us, and they work: they get under our skin. Prufer powerfully explores the roles of imagination and art in how we explain ourselves to ourselves.

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning poet and nationally recognized literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher’s Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey is a poetry collection about entering middle age, raising a young family, sustaining a marriage, and taking care of a severely disabled child. Built around two sequences of sonnets, and interrupted by two sets of lyric poems, a set of prose poems, and a long poem about death, the book narrates a family’s move to the suburbs and their coming to terms with the ghosts of the past and with hard-to-hold hopes for the future.

Elegy: Poems of Loss and Hope, a Reading with Steven Cramer
2021-04-28 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
Join poets Tim Carver, Steven Cramer (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty), and Tom Schmidt for a poetry reading focused on the themes of grief, mourning, and moving toward hope. This reading will feature a short reading from each poet and an opportunity for Q&A after.

Tim Carter is the author of Remains (BOAAT Press 2020) and teaches creative writing and rhetoric in the community.

Steven Cramer is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Listen (MadHat Press, 2020) and Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012). He founded and currently teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Tom Schmidt has published two poetry chapbooks, Enough to Drink or Drown (Kelsay Books, 2020) and Like, A Metaphor (Encircle Publications, June 2021). He received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and taught humanities for thirty years in California, Oregon, and Vermont.

Breakwater Reading Series -- Julia Leef
2021-04-30 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
Breakwater’s online reading series will have its last event of the semester this Friday, April 30th. Featuring Lauren Fitch, Nicole Graev Lipson, Julia Leef (Fiction, June 2018), and Spencer Johnson.

The Breakwater Reading Series brings together fiction, poetry, and nonfiction MFA candidates from UMass Boston, Boston University, Lesley University, and Emerson College.

Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed
2021-05-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Chaguanas
Cambridge Common Writers is proud to host a celebration of Celeste Mohammed’s (Fiction, June 2016) debut novel-in-stories, Pleasantview. Join us for a reading by Celeste, as well as appearances by some special guests!

Click here to register for this Zoom event.

Celeste Mohammed’s work has appeared in The New England Review, Litmag, Epiphany, and The Rumpus, among other places. Several of the stories in Pleasantview have won awards, including the 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Celeste graduated from Lesley University with an MFA in Creative Writing. She currently resides in Trinidad with her family.

Building Alexandria Book Launch: Clarissa Adkins
2021-05-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Event
Join Clarissa Adkins (Poetry, June 2018) at the launch of her first poetry collection, Building Alexandria. The event will be hosted by Eileen Cleary (Poetry, June 2016) and Clarissa will be interviewed by Rex Arrasmith (Fiction, January 2018; Poetry, June 2020).

“Clarissa Adkins has a mind I’d love to inhabit, fully attuned to the strangenesses of love, parenthood, mortality, and fleeting beauty. These poems are playful, sharp, dextrous, and witty—but they’re also filled with sonic brilliance, her mastery of the musical possibilities of language evident throughout. This is a terrific first book, one that I’ll return to with great pleasure.” — Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction

Dr. Lisa Gruenberg discusses her memoir My City of Dreams with Dr. David Urion
2021-05-11 17:00 - 18:00 | Online Event
Join author Dr. Lisa Gruenberg (Nonfiction, June 2007) for a special virtual conversation with Dr. David Urion about her second-generation Holocaust memoir, My City of Dreams. This event, hosted by the bioethics centers of Harvard Medical School and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, will not only discuss Gruenberg’s personal journey, but will also examine her memoir’s importance from the point of view of living ethically.

In My City of Dreams, Gruenberg, confronted with her elderly father’s flashbacks and nightmares, begins to inhabit the story of his sister Mia, who disappeared into Germany in 1941 when she was just fifteen years old. After her father’s death in 2005, Gruenberg traveled to Vienna, Germany and back to her childhood to explore this lost landscape, and to trace the fates of Mia, their extended family, friends and neighbors. Using letters, old photographs, primary source documents and her father’s writing, she weaves her story with theirs.

Jane Brox (Nonfiction, MFA Writing Faculty), author of Brilliant and Silence writes: “Gruenberg’s search for coherence becomes a journey of both discovery and imagination, and ultimately brings her to an understanding that proves also to be a form of healing.” My City of Dreams is a gift – an honest and thoughtful book, beautifully written and full of compassion.

Learn more about My City of Dreams here: lisagruenberg.com

White Whale Bookstore Presents Springtime Online Reading & Conversation: Karin Cecile Davidson & William Lychack
2021-05-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
Celebrating Karin Cecile Davidson’s (Fiction, June 2009) Sybelia Drive and William Lychack’s Cargill Falls.

Karin Cecile Davidson is originally from the Gulf Coast. Her novel Sybelia Drive was published by Braddock Avenue Books in Autumn 2020. Her stories have appeared in Story Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Five Points Journal, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Fine Arts Work Center Summer Residency, an Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, a Studios of Key West Artist Residency, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship. She has an MFA from Lesley University and is an Interviews Editor for Newfound Journal. For more, please visit her website.

William Lychack is the author of Cargill Falls, The Wasp Eater, and The Architect of Flowers, and his work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Best Small Fictions, and on public radio’s This American Life. He currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is Director of the Graduate Writing Program. For more, please go to www.lychack.com

Chapter and Verse Reading Series -- Jennifer LeBlanc and Jane Brox
2021-05-14 19:30 - 20:30 | Online Zoom Event
Join Jennifer LeBlanc (Poetry, June 2012) with Jane Brox (Nonfiction, MFA Writing Faculty) and Jeffrey Harrison for a reading hosted by Susanna Kittredge at Chapter and Verse.

Massachusetts Poetry Festival -- Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic
2021-05-15 18:00 - 19:00 | Online Zoom Event
When coronavirus started closing down New England in March 2020, life changed dramatically. People quickly rethought their approaches to work, school, shopping, socializing and more. In response, Lily Poetry Press created an anthology, Voices Amidst the Virus, edited by Eileen Cleary and Christine Jones, which features poems by Kevin Prufer, Annie Finch, Daniel Summerhill, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Anne-Marie Oomen, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and many others that explores our shared experiences of isolation, lock-down, re-entry. In this panel discussion, the editors and two poets from the collection will talk about the inspiration behind the project as well as their experiences writing through the pandemic. They will read a selection of poems that confront despair and reach for hope. And there will be sourdough! During the interactive session, the audience will be invited to share their own Covid-19 stories and poems.

Participating CCW community members:

Steven Cramer (Poetry, MFA Writing Faculty)Eileen Cleary (Poetry, June 2016)Christine Jones (Poetry, January 2014)

We Contain Multitudes: Supporting Diverse Diversity Within Asian American Voices
2021-05-17 20:00 - 21:00 | YouTube
Featuring Debbi Michiko Florence, Christina Soontornvat, Andrea Wang (WFYP, June 2011), Veera Hiranandani, and Mike Jung.

Join Middle Grade authors as they share their experiences growing up as Asian Americans and how their backgrounds influence the books they write. Discussion will center on the need for MANY Asian American penned novels to reflect the diversity of the Asian American experience. Alum Andrea Wang will be talking about her upcoming MG, The Many Meanings of Meilan.

Blue Desert by Celia Jeffries -- Book Launch
2021-05-18 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
Author Celia Jeffries (Fiction and Nonfiction, 2008) will be joined in conversation with Janet Pocorobba (Nonfiction, 2006), Associate Director of the Lesley MFA Program, to celebrate the launch of Jeffries’ new book, Blue Desert.

Blue Desert is the story of Alice George, a headstrong young British woman, and her life among the Tuareg, a tribe of nomadic warriors. While the outside world faced the catastrophe of World War I, the Tuareg continued to crisscross the Sahara as they always had. A matrilineal society in which the men are veiled and the women hold property—a world in which anything can happen—it was a world well suited to eighteen-year-old Alice, who discovers a life she could never live in corseted England.

Jeffries and Pocorobba will focus their discussion on the fine art of revision and read from their books.

Jeffries’ work has appeared in numerous newspapers and literary magazines including Westview, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Puerto del Sol, as well as the anthology Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper. She has received grants from Turkey Land Cove Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, and La Muse. Jeffries holds an MA from Brandeis and worked in news and educational publishing before earning an MFA from Lesley University. She has worked with writers at all levels, from elementary school to university both here and abroad, and in many different communities, including incarcerated, literacy, and ESL programs. Her own writing has been nurtured in the community of writers in Western Massachusetts, where she is on the steering committee of Straw Dog Writers Guild, and where she offers workshops at Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop. Pocorobba’s book, The Fourth String: A Memoir of Sensei and Me, was published in 2019. Her essays and memoirs have appeared in publications including The Rumpus, River Teeth, Harvard Review, Nixes Mate, The Writer, and forthcoming in Writers’ Digest. She is also a book editor and coach and works with writers in all stages of the projects as The Book Whisperer.

Story Time with Asian American Picture Books
2021-05-22 12:00 - 13:00 | YouTube
Featuring Andrea Wang (WFYP, June 2011), Kristen Giang, Benson Shum, Wendy Wan-Long Shang, Gracey Zhang, and Mượn Thị Văn

Entertain your little ones! Join six Asian American/Asian Canadian authors as they read their recent picture books: Andrea Wang (WATERCRESS), Kristen Giang (GINGER AND CHRYSANTHEMUM), Benson Shum (ALEX’S GOOD FORTUNE), Wendy Wan-Long Shang (THE RICE IN THE POT GOES ROUND AND ROUND), Gracey Zhang (LALA’S WORDS), and Mượn Thị Văn (WISHES).

MOTHERS, A Virtual Reading of New Works
2021-05-23 17:00 - 18:00 | Online Event
A Reading of New Works… in honor of mothers everywhere. Featuring works from:

“A Lovely Day Outside” by Rhiannon Ciara Vaughn (WSS, January 2019)

“Leftovers” by Sarah Hunter

“You’ve Got to Keep Mother Alive” by Vance Walker

“Counterpoint” by Hortense Gerardo

“Crusades” by John Mabey

“Mom’s Recipes” by Ken Levine

CCW Debut Book Launch for Clarissa Adkins and Poetry Open Mic
2021-05-23 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
CCW book launch, featuring Clarissa Adkins (Poetry, June 2018) author of Building Alexandria (Lily Poetry Review, 2021).

Join on Sunday, May 23, 2021 at 7:00 pm Eastern to hear Clarissa read from her book and for you to share your poetry. After Clarissa’s reading there will be time for an open-mic for those who are interested.

K-pop in YA panel -- Axie Oh
2021-05-28 19:00 - 20:00 | YouTube
Featuring: Kat Cho, Axie Oh (WFYP, June 2017), Lyla Lee, Stephan Lee, Maurene Goo

A BTS look at the Blood, Sweat, and Tears that goes into creating the DNA of a K-Pop Young Adult book. From the bright lights of the stage to the sweet bloom of first love, these authors write it all amid the backdrop of the Hallyu wave.

The Shores of Self: Creativity and Complex Narratives in Diasporic Communities
2021-06-02 18:30 - 19:30 | Online Zoom Event
The Faraday Publishing Company will be hosting their first event of the year, “The Shores of Self: Creativity and Complex Narratives in Diasporic Communities”, on Wednesday, June 2 at 6:30pm EDT. They will be joined by writers and scholars: Alyss Dixson, Tony Medina, Lisa Pegram (Poetry, June 2012), and Craig Santos Perez.

This panel discussion, which will be moderated by Enzo Silon Surin (Poetry, 2012), has been convened due to the number of incidents of anti-Black and anti-Asian/Pacific Islander violence in America, which have been an all-too-frequent refrain in headlines for the past few years. The realities of Black and Asian and Pacific Islander communities are complex and dynamic, and our panel of world-class writers and scholars will be sharing their work and insights to “trouble” (as Paisley Rekdal says in Appropriate: A Provocation) the ways these communities are portrayed in the media.

Voices Amidst the Virus Reading
2021-06-08 19:00 - 20:00 | Online Zoom Event
Please join Cambridge Commons Writers for a night of poetry featuring pieces published recently in Voices Amidst the Virus by Lily Poetry Press, edited by Lesley graduates Eileen Cleary (Poetry, June 2016) and Christine Jones (Poetry, January 2014). Fellow poetry Lesley alums Suzanne Edison (July 2016), Cindy Hunter Morgan, Jon Lee (January 2017), Robert Gamble (January 2017), Anne Riesenberg (Nonfiction), Michael Mercurio (January 2017), Frances Donovan (June 2019), and MFA Writing Faculty Steven Cramer and Kevin Prufer will read a selection of poems inspired by their experiences of isolation, lock-down, and re-entry in this time of Covid. We will also play film clips from MSU’s Filmretry Festival based on the anthology’s text.

Virtual Event: Chaney Kwak in conversation with Daniel Handler
2021-06-08 21:00 - 23:00 | Online Zoom Event
Chaney Kwak (Fiction, June 2009) appears in conversation with the legendary Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) to discuss The Passenger at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. Handler is the author of seven novels, including Bottle Grove.In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the Arctic Sea. Rocked by 60-foot swells and 87-mile-per-hour gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship. The Passenger takes readers for an unforgettable journey from the Norwegian coast to the South China Sea, from post-WWII Korea to pandemic-struck San Francisco. Kwak weaves his personal experience into events spanning decades and continents to explore the serendipity and relationships that move humans. Chaney Kwak has been traversing the globe for more than a decade to write about food and travel. His work appears regularly in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as magazines such as Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, and Travel + Leisure. Mr. Kwak teaches nonfiction writing at the Stanford Continuing Studies program and lives in San Francisco.Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards.

Chaney Kwak in conversation with Lori Ostlund
2021-06-10 20:00 - 21:00 | Online Event
Chaney Kwak (Fiction, June 2009) appears in conversation (virtually) with Lori Ostlund to discuss The Passenger hosted by Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis.In a starred review, Foreword Reviews writes, “The Passenger, with its bare-bones honesty and dry, cynical humor, reveals that when all is said and done, it’s the little things that matter: small acts of courage and kindness, words of love, and gratitude for the gift of another day.”In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the Arctic Sea. Rocked by 60-foot swells and 87-mile-per-hour gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship.Chaney Kwak has been traversing the globe for more than a decade to write about food and travel. His work appears regularly in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as magazines such as Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, and Travel + Leisure. Mr. Kwak teaches nonfiction writing at the Stanford Continuing Studies program and lives in San Francisco.

Lesley MFA Evening Reading Series - Michael Lowenthal (Fiction) and Celeste Mohammed (Fiction)
2021-06-18 18:00 - 19:30 | Online Zoom Event

Virtual Event: Chaney Kwak in conversation with Nathan Hake
2021-06-18 20:30 - 23:30 | Online Event
Chaney Kwak (Fiction, June 2009) appears in conversation with travel writer Nathan Hake to discuss The Passenger at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver.In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the Arctic Sea. Rocked by 60-foot swells and 87-mile-per-hour gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship. The Passenger takes readers for an unforgettable journey from the Norwegian coast to the South China Sea, from post-WWII Korea to pandemic-struck San Francisco. Kwak weaves his personal experience into events spanning decades and continents to explore the serendipity and relationships that move humans.Chaney Kwak has been traversing the globe for more than a decade to write about food and travel. His work appears regularly in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as magazines such as Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, and Travel + Leisure. Mr. Kwak teaches nonfiction writing at the Stanford Continuing Studies program and lives in San Francisco.Originally from Denver, Colorado, Nathan Hake is a recovering corporate lawyer turned travel blogger, digital nomad, and entrepreneur. His travel blog, TravelLemming.com, focuses on promoting emerging destinations around the world as a solution to the problem of overtourism. He also founded a small B2B software company, Collection Harbor, and has done some freelance writing work along the way.
