University of Massachusetts Amherst: UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers Presents the Fall 2022 Visiting Writers Series

The MFA for Poets and Writers is pleased to announce the Fall ‘22 Visiting Writers Series. This year’s series features Abigail Chabitnoy, Edie Meidav, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Kyle Dacuyan. Readings are free and will be held in the Great Hall at Old Chapel and begin at 6 p.m.

For over 50 years, the nationally renowned Visiting Writers Series at UMass Amherst has presented emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The Series is sponsored by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative, and made possible by support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council and the English Department.


Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. She is the author of the forthcoming “In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful;”“How to Dress a Fish,” shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook “Converging Lines of Light.” She was a 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon Writers Workshop and the recipient of the 2020 Witter Bynner Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado. Her poems have appeared in “Hayden’s Ferry Review,” “Boston Review,” “Tin House,” “Gulf Coast,” “LitHub,” and “Red Ink,” among others. This fall, she joined the MFA for Poets and Writers faculty at UMass Amherst as an assistant professor. Abigail holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. Find her at salmonfisherpoet.com.

This event is part of Art. Sustainability. Activism., a collaboration between the Fine Arts Center, the MFA for Poets and Writers, and the School of Earth and Sustainability.

Edie Meidav is the author of the lyric novel “Another Love Discourse,” as well as “Kingdom of the Young,” a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, and three award-winning novels called editorial picks by the New York Times and elsewhere: “Lola, California,” “Crawl Space” and “The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon,” and a co-edited anthology “Strange Attractors.” Her work has been recognized by foundations including Lannan, Howard, Whiting, Fulbright (Sri Lanka and Cyprus), the Kafka Prize, the Village Voice, the Bard Fiction Prize, Yaddo, Macdowell, VCCA, Art OMI and Fundacion Valparaiso. Former director of the MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco, she has served as judge for Yaddo, the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, the PEN/Bingham first novel prize, and as senior editor at “Conjunctions.”


Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the author of the bestselling short story collection “Friday Black.” His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including “Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row,” “Gravel,” and “The Breakwater Review,” where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the second Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. He is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University.


Kyle Dacuyan is the author of “Incitements,” a 2021 NEA Fellow in Creative Writing, and executive director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s. Poems appear in “The Brooklyn Rail,” “The Offing,” “The Rumpus,” “Social Text,” and elsewhere, and he has presented performance work at Ars Nova, FringeArts, Haus für Poesie and The Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, among other places.