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Join the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) from Sunday, January 4, through Wednesday, January 7, 2026, as the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFACW) program presents the January Evening Reading Series. Visiting writers, acclaimed for their work in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting, will read and perform alongside several of our full-time mentors. Each evening will engage audiences with poetry, memoir, or fiction from some of today’s most vibrant and vital voices.We are pleased to invite the public to attend the January Evening Reading Series events, held in the CLE Commons Room 201 on the IAIA campus at 83 Avan Nu Po Road, Santa Fe, NM 87508.
All readings are open to the public and free of charge, and will be held in person and virtually via livestream on the IAIA website and Facebook. See links below to watch the livestreams.
We hope to see you there! For questions, please contact IAIA MFACW Program Coordinator Veronica Bustamante at [email protected].
Evening Reading Series Events
Sunday, January 4 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Joseph V. Lee (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), and Chip Livingston (Mixed-blood Creek)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Monday, January 5 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Kim Blaeser (White Earth Nation), Pam Houston, and Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota Nation)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Tuesday, January 6 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Arthur Sze, current Poet Laureate of the United States (Second generation Chinese American) and Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo)—Performing Arts and Fitness Center, IAIA Campus
Wednesday, January 7 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Shane Hawk (Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of OK), Bojan Louis (Diné), and Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Biographies
Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer based in New York City. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Mercy University. His writing has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Vox, High Country News, and more. He was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and a Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow at Grist.
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003), Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. In addition to teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), he joined the faculty at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 2019.
Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of six books: three collections of poetry, Saints of the Republic (2023), Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (2012), and Museum of False Starts (2010); a nonfiction book for elementary school students, Early People of Florida (2023); a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction, Naming Ceremony (2014); and a novel, Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death (2017). He is the editor of Love Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie (2022). Chip has received awards from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip’s writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and Cincinnati Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Foundation’s websites. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Regis University.
MFA in Creative Writing
The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is designed as a two-year program with two intensive week-long residencies per year (summer and winter) at IAIA. Students and faculty mentors gather for a week of workshops, lectures, and readings. At the end of the residency week, each student is matched with a faculty mentor, who then works one-on-one with the student for the semester. IAIA’s program is unique in that we emphasize the importance of Indigenous writers speaking to the Indigenous experience. The literature we read carries a distinct Native American and First Nations emphasis. The MAFCW offers four areas of emphasis: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting.
The deadline to apply for the 2026 academic year is February 1 at 5:00 pm (MST).
https://iaia.edu/event/2026-mfacw-january-evening-reading-series-lee-bitsui-livingston/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), 47 A van NU Po, Santa Fe, NM 87508, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
