Stellar Alumni Reading Series: Jacqueline Balderrama and Venita Blackburn

The Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at ASU presents a reading by two of its star graduates: poet Jacqueline Balderrama (MFA 2016) and fiction writer Venita Blackburn (MFA 2008). The event takes place on Thursday, March 3, 2022 at 7 p.m. in the Memorial Union (Pima 230) on ASU's Tempe campus.

Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of "Now in Color" (Perugia Press, 2020) and the chapbook "Nectar and Small" (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She serves as a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine, has been involved in the Letras Latinas literary initiative and the ASU Prison Education Program. Currently, she’s a Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence and Clinical Assistant Professor at ASU.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, "Black Jesus and Other Superheroes" in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, "How to Wrestle a Girl," was published in the fall of 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.