Presented by the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, The Blueprint Reading series focuses on bringing to Goucher early-career writers of color, queer writers, and writers with disabilities. These writers hold lectures on craft, publishing, and readings/Q+A sessions.
The Blueprint Reading Series is curated by Edgar Kunz.
Spring 2025
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Spring 2025 Blueprint Reading Series guests:
Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller, and a firestarter. Her short story collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster, was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and was a finalist for the 2018 Phillip K. Dick Award. She has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Tin House, Millay Arts, the Vermon Studio Center, and the McKnight Foundation.
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His debut poetry collection, Threat Come Close, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.
Past Events
FALL 2024
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Fall 2024 Blueprint Reading Series Guest:
Taylor Byas, Ph.D., is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati. She is the author of two chapbooks, and her debut full-length poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.
SPRING 2024
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Spring 2024 Blueprint Reading Series Guest:
Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. A recipient of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Award and the Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, his works have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, The Best of Net, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Forward Book of Poetry Anthology. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
SPRING 2023
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Spring 2023 Blueprint Reading Series Guests:
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets (FSG, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently a senior editor at The Yale Review and a lecturer in writing at Yale.
Claire Jiménez is the author of Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023). In 2020 she cofounded the Puerto Rican Literature Project with a group of Puerto Rican writers and scholars and the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Center at the University of Houston. She is an assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina.
FALL 2022
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Fall 2022 Blueprint Reading Series Guests:
Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist living in Washington, DC. Her debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row Books, 2021), was an Edgar Award Nominee and was named one of The New York Times’ Best Thrillers of 2021. She has a Ph.D. in social psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology. and quantitative methods.
Su Cho is a poet, essayist, and the author of The Symmetry of Fish, which won the 2021 National Poetry Series. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Gulf Coast, and New England Review, the 2021 Best American and Best New Poets anthologies; and elsewhere. She has served as the editor-in-chief of Indiana Review and Cream City Review and the guest editor for Poetry magazine.
Kien Lam is the author of Extinction Theory, winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. He is a Kundiman fellow and received his M.F.A. from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles and works in gaming
and television.
SPRING 2022
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Spring 2022 Blueprint Reading Series Guests:
Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American poet born in Canada and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Kingdom and After and Good Boys, a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Alex McElroy is a nonbinary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, The Atmospherians, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Other writing appears in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
FALL 2021
The Kratz Center is proud to present its Fall 2021 Blueprint Reading Series Guests:
Hafizah Geter, a Nigerian-American poet and writer, is the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American, nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award and a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award.
Kawai Strong Washburn is from the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai’i. His novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel and was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.