2025 MFA Submit-a-thon
Dear writers,
As you know, being a writer is not just about the (many, many) hours we spend alone in a room composing our works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between—it's also about getting said works out into the world. Which is why it's time for the Fall 2025 Submit-a-thon.
It can sometimes feel confusing and/or intimidating to submit work to magazines and journals, but that's why it's good to do so in the safety and solidarity of a community of your fellow writers.
THERE WILL BE FREE PIZZA AND SALAD!
This is an opportunity to submit work you feel is ready to go out into the world. However, it's also a chance to talk and commiserate with each other about writing and publishing in an informal setting. So don't worry if you don't have anything to submit; it will still be a helpful and hopefully fun time.
Andrew
Date:
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Location:
Ethereal in Cornerstone
MFA Professionalization Session fest. Lauren Cerand, publicist and consultant
Lauren Cerand is a publicist and consultant with more than two decades of experience in the worlds of literature and the arts, spanning strategic communications to high-profile events and board leadership. She will speak to our MFA students about utilizing publicists as professional writers, as well as careers in publicity.
Date:
Location:
1245 POT
Incubator Reading Series feat. Kimi Hardesty, Dani Summerlin, Lora Smith, and Melissa Scholes Young
Good Afternoon,
This Friday, September 26th, at 5:30 PM in Commonwealth House, the UKY MFA program is hosting the semester's first incubator series!
Encourage your students to attend! There is an undergraduate open mic prior to the main event. Sign up for the open mic before event start time!
Hope to see you there!
Date:
Location:
Commonwealth House
Visiting Speaker Series
The Department of English Visiting Speaker Series, organized by the Division of Literature and Film, offers a regular series of invited lectures by leading scholars of literature, criticism and theory, and film studies. The events usually include a large public lecture and smaller group sessions with students.
Visiting Writers Series: Alumni Reading feat. Erika Simpson, Allegra Solomon, and Alfonso Zapata
Erika J. Simpson holds an MFA ('21) in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is the recipient of the 2021 UK MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay, “If You Ever Find Yourself,” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. This Is Your Mother is her debut memoir, and she also writes fiction for the page and screen.
Allegra Solomon received her MFA ('22) from the University of Kentucky. Her debut short story collection, There’s Nothing Left for You Here, won the Kimbilio National Fiction prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and has appeared in The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Lolwe, and more.
Alfonso Zapata received his MFA ('23) in poetry at the University of Kentucky. He is the recipient of the Jim Lawless IV Poetry Prize and the 2022 & 2023 UK MFA Poetry Awards. His work has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, and he is the author of the chapbook, Together Now (Belle Point Press, 2024). His first full-length book, To Pay for Our Next Breath, won the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize.
Date:
Location:
Cornerstone - Esports Theater, 401 S Limestone, Lexington, KY 40508
English professor Hannah Pittard explores truth, humor and chaos in latest novel
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 26, 2025) — Fiction has long offered writers a veil — an opportunity to tell deeply personal stories at a safe distance.
But what happens when that veil is intentionally thin, when the line between fact and imagination is not simply blurred but deliberately twisted?
Faculty WIP Workshop
Please join the Committee on Social Theory for a faculty WIP workshop with Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz and Peter Kalliney as respondent, happening Friday, September 12, from noon to 1:15pm at Bingham Davis House.
“A National Poetics: Frames of Containment” is a draft of the introduction to my monograph manuscript, titled Anational Poetics. The book presents a critical account of post-Civil Rights ethnic minority poetry oriented by different ways of understanding community and proposes the concept of the anational to recognize social practices incompatible with how the nation operates. I use the anational to analyze experimental forms as expressions of minoritarian belonging with political projects that achieve coherence through their own singular histories. The introduction delineates the conceptual and methodological parameters of the project, detailing the structural characteristics of the nation through its historical development, European origins, and entanglement with capitalism. It also explains the nation’s ubiquity as an aesthetic and political phenomenon, noting how the nation form historically occludes the divergent qualities of a vast set of dissimilar collectivities to establish their status as nations.
Date:
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Location:
Bingham Davis House