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The Walter Nathan Literary Initiatives hosts the annual Creative Writing event honoring debut publications. This year's lineup features two Creative Writing MFA alums with their first books: Tarik Dobbs with the poetry collection Nazar Boy (Haymarket, 2024) and Asha Thanki with the novel A Thousand Times Before (Viking). They are joined by current MFA poet Okwudili Nebeolisa with the poetry collection Terminal Maladies (Autumn House, 2024). Sponsored by the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program. The event is free and open to the public. No reservations or tickets necessary. ASL interpretation provided. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email sutt0063@umn.edu or call 612-626-1528.
Tarik Dobbs is a writer, artist, and Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Poems by Dobbs have been featured in the anthologies Best New Poets and Best of the Net, as well as in AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Dobbs is the director of poetry.onl and has served as a guest editor at Mizna and Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Dobbs holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in art, theory, practice from Northwestern University. Dobbs is assistant professor of English in creative writing (poetry) at Southwest Minnesota State University. The debut poetry collections by Dobbs, Nazar Boy (2024) and Dearbornistan (2026), are published with Haymarket Books.
Okwudili Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies, (Autumn House Press, 2024), selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggett Prize for Fiction. His poems have appeared in the New England Review, Poetry Magazine, and Threepenny Review, among others. His fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review, while his nonfiction has been published in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Minnesota, where he is the recipient of a Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He is currently a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine.
An essayist and fiction writer, Asha Thanki’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, Platypus Press’ wildness, The Common, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. A Kundiman fellow, Thanki has received support from Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature (Speculative Literature Foundation). She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Thanki's debut novel A Thousand Times Before, published by Viking, was reviewed in People Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and NPR, among others, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
310 Pillsbury Dr SE, Minneapolis, MN, United States, Minnesota 55455
