Writers in the Woods Literary Speaker Series

Hear, meet and exchange ideas with well-known poets and writers from across the country at the University of Nevada, Reno Lake Tahoe’s Writers in the Woods literary reading and workshop series

Current season

Writers in the Woods presents an evening with Brynn Saito and Brian Turner on August 5, in Prim Library, Incline Village, NV at 7:00 pm. This is a live event. All are welcome.

Brian Turner

Brian Turner is author of the memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and five collections of poetry— Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise; with The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook due out from Alice James Books in fall 2023. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres. A musician, he has written and recorded albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and American Undertow with The Retro Legion. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito is a poet, organizer, professor, and author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon and The Palace of Contemplating Departure. She is a winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She was also a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Her third book, Under a Future Sky, will be published in August 2023. Brynn is a two-time recipient of the California State Library’s Civil Liberties Public Education grant for her work with Yonsei Memory Project (YMP). Co-founded with farmer and artist, Nikiko Masumoto, YMP awakens the archives of Japanese American history through arts-based, intergenerational, and intercultural public programming. In 2019, Brynn and Nikiko were featured in Vogue magazine for their work with YMP.

Selected past speakers

Steven Dunn

Steven Dunn is a 2021 Whiting Award winner, shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best Young American Novelists.” He is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver. He currently teaches creative writing at Naropa University.

Photo by Beowulf Sheenah

Alan Heathcock

Alan Heathcock’s 2022 novel 40 is a dystopian myth of a future America embroiled in civil war and disaster of Biblical proportions. Heathcock has won a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a National Magazine Award, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His story collection, VOLT, was a ‘Best Book of the Year’ selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Chicago Tribune, was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders, In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, was the 2021 Common Read for Nevada Humanities. The New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature writing was a Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year, and won “Best Book of 2020” from NPR, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Book Page, and more.

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House. Her award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties was chosen by the New York Times in 2018 as one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere.

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio's latest books are the poetry collections Mortal Trash and Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to her seven poetry collections, two novels, and two story collections, she is the author of two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius.

Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello is the author the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and received starred reviews at Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage, as well as making several Best of 2021 lists. She is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men, which is now under development by Denver & Delilah, Charlize Theron’s production company, and Every Kind of Wanting, which was included by both Chicago Magazine and The Chicago Review of Books as one of the “Best Books of 2016.”