All readings are supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Southwest and Border Studies Institute’s outreach fund.

Reading events are on Fridays at 7:30 pm in the CMI Theater in Milton Hall on the New Mexico State campus, unless otherwise noted.

2026-27

September 11: Jessica Alexander

Jessica Alexander's novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) was published by Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her collaborative project (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) That Woman Could Be You came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her gothic novel, Agnes, We're Not Murderers, was published by Clash Books in 2026. Her short fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at NMSU.

October 9: Joni Wallace with MFA candidate Lauren Lee

Joni Wallace’s third full-length poetry collection is Landscape with Missing River (Barrow Street Press, 2023), recipient of the AZ-NM Book Award.  Other honors include Four Way Books’ Levis Prize for her second collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Baltic Writing Residency. Work from her documentary poetry collection, Kingdom Come Radio Show, is anthologized in Privacy Policy, The Poetry of Surveillance (ed. Andrew Ridker) and has been featured by the Scottish Poetry Library and the Poetry Society of America. Joni’s poetry and hybrid works (sound, video) appear in such journals as Boston Review, Conduit, Connotations Press, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, West Branch Wired, The Volta, Interrupture, Laurel Review, The Drunken Boat, and Plume. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and a JD from the University of New Mexico. 

October 23: Gion Davis with MFA candidate Yooko Peters

Gion Davis is a trans poet from Española, New Mexico, where he grew up on a sheep ranch. His poetry has been featured in HAD, No Tokens, Sprung Formal, The Tiny, and other publications. His debut collection, Too Much (2022), was selected by Chen Chen for the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize. For the past four years, he has toured and performed with the DIY music collective Clementine Was Right, and his contributions to songwriting have been highlighted in publications such as Paste and Stereogum. He graduated with his MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

December 4: Leslie McIntosh with MFA candidate Tia Credle

Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) thinks a lot about the relationship between vocal stereotypy, perseveration, cognitive flexibility, negative capability, and reaching for whatever is on the other side of Leslie's own black interiority. Leslie’s debut volume of poetry, within-group variance, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2025 Changes Book Prize (Changes Press, 2026) and was a finalist for the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2023-2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize. Leslie’s writing has been supported by the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hawthornden Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Jersey City Arts Council, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, among other distinctions. Leslie's poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Beloit PoetryJournal, Foglifter, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, the anthology In The Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy, and widely elsewhere. Leslie has presented literary art across the country as a featured guest at universities, literary festivals, national poetry slams, and other convenings since 2005, but currently calls home a rowhouse on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, presently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.

February 5: Brooke Sahni with MFA candidate Joshua Ball

Brooke Sahni is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently In This Distance. Her debut collection, Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press), won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and her chapbook, Divining (Orison Books), won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly, The Missouri Review, Nimrod, The Cincinnati Review, Boulevard, Verse Daily, 32 Poems and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Letters, Dreams is forthcoming in fall 2026.

February 19: Susan Briante with MFA candidate Jayden Presley

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” Her newest collection, 13 Questions for the Next Economy, gathers selections from her three previous books of poetry—Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders—as well as new poems, prose, and images.

Briante's creative nonfiction and essays on documentary poetics have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Jacket2, and The Believer. Her poems and essays have been collected in The Best American Poetry, Bodies Built for Game, and The Poetry of Capital, among other anthologies, and are forthcoming in Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser and differences. Briante’s poetry has been translated into Italian, Chinese, and Galician. El Mercado se pregunta, poet Giancarlo Huapaya’s translation of The Market Wonders, was published by Kriller71 (Barcelona).

​A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

​​Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation.

She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and director of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups. She is also a member of the Detained Project a team of artists, scholars and activists who record and archive the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.  Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, creative nonfiction, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, and translation.

March 5: Pardeep Toor with MFA candidate Jack Bylund

Pareep Toor grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and currently lives in Colorado. He is a writer and librarian. He also teaches creative writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

His writing has appeared in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize, Southern Humanities Review, Catapult, Electric Literature, and Longreads.

His short story collection, HANDS (Cornerstone Press) was published in April 2026.

April 2: Caroline Tracey with MFA candidate Jay Paine

Caroline Tracey’s debut book, a blend of environmental reportage and memoir titled SALT LAKES: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY, was published in March 2026 by W.W. Norton.

Originally from Colorado, Caroline holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025 she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest. She has also taught writing as a visiting professor at Deep Springs College.

As a journalist and critic, Caroline’s work focuses on the environment, migration, and the arts in the US Southwest, Mexico, and their borderlands. Her reporting appears in the New Yorker, n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, and elsewhere, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art. Read more here.

Caroline lives with her wife, Mexican architect Mariana GJP, between Tucson, Arizona and Mexico City.

April 16: Daniel Simon with MFA candidate Marilyn Crawford

Daniel Simon is the founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. He is the co-author, with Jack Hoffman, of Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman and translator of Van Gogh: Self Portraits by Pascal Bonafoux. His debut novel, Ashland, was published by Europa Editions in February 2026.