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Literary Radar: Lectores Series Returns to Falk Theatre

The University of Tampa’s MFA program has a long history of nurturing great writers, and attracting accomplished poets and novelists to the area. June 15-22, a list of critically acclaimed writers will read inside historic Falk Theatre during the MFA program’s Lectores Series.

In the factories of Tampa and Ybor City, Lectores de Tabaqueres were men who read aloud to the workers who rolled the cigars on the factory floor. The University of Tampa MFA program named our public readings the Lectores series to honor this connection between literature and our city’s history.

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All events in the series begin at 7:30pm and are free and open to the public. Falk Theatre is located at 428 West Kennedy Boulevard. Here’s the full lineup:

 

June 15 

Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories and the bestselling The Keep. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize.

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June 16

Sarah Gerard

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies.

 

June 17

Tommy Pico

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), Junk (forthcoming 2018 from Tin House Books), the zine series Hey, Teebs and the chapbook app absentMINDR (VerbalVisual 2014). He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008-2013.

 

June 19

Jensen Beach

Jensen Beach is the author of two story collections, most recently Swallowed by the Cold (Graywolf). He holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as an MA and BA in English from Stockholm University. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College, where he is the fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. His writing has appeared recently in A Public Space, the Paris Review, and The New Yorker.

 

June 20

Zukiswa Wanner

Zukiswa Wanner is the 2015 winner of South African Literary Award’s K. Sello Duiker Award for her fourth novel, London Cape Town Joburg. Her third novel Men of the South was shortlisted for Commonwealth Best Book and the Herman Charles Bosman Awards. A founding member of the ReadSA initiative, Wanner was a founding board member of the literary initiative Writivism in Uganda and is on the Advisory Board of the Ake Literary Festival in Nigeria.

Silvia Curbelo 

Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her collection Falling Landscape was published by Anhinga Press in 2015. She is also the author of three other poetry collections, The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press), The Geography of Leaving (Silverfish Review Press), and Ambush (Main Street Rag Publishers).

 

June 21

Rahul Mehta

Rahul Mehta is the author of a novel, No Other World (Harper, 2017), and a short story collection, Quarantine (HarperPerennial, 2011), which won a Lambda Literary Award and the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Epoch, The Sun, Noon, and the prize anthology New Stories from the South. His essays have appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times and in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, and Marie Claire India.

 

June 22

Kevin Moffett

Kevin Moffett is the author of two books, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s; and, his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Believer, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

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