The University of St. Thomas and the MA in Creative Writing & Publishing Program is excited to host our fifth annual Summer Publishing Institute, focused this year on poetry. This free event feature award-winning authors including Minnesota Book Award finalist Sun Yung Shin

9:00 – 10:00 am: Sun Yung Shin in Conversation with Lizzie Davis

Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. Shin is the author of the poetry collections The Wet Hex (2022); Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry). She is co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.

Lizzie Davis is an editor at Coffee House Press and translator from Spanish and Italian to English. She is privileged to acquire literary fiction and nonfiction for the press’s general list as well as the translation list and is passionate about championing writing that takes risks and pushes boundaries thematically or formally. Some writers she has worked with at Coffee House include Alia Trabucco Zerán, Trisha Low, Amy Fusselman, Roque Larraquy, Vi Khi Nao, and Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, and her recent acquisitions include works by Mónica Ojeda, Poupeh Missaghi, Daniel Saldaña París, and Jamie Marina Lau. She has translated My First Bikini by Elena Medel and Ornament by Juan Cárdenas (forthcoming from Coffee House in 2020) and co-translated Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions with the author.

10:15 – 11:30: Panel on revising and submitting poetry to literary magazines

Our panel this year will feature poets Leslie Miller, Chris Santiago, John Muellner, and Hayley Graffunder.

Leslie Miller is author of six collections of poetry including Y, The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Professor of English at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an M.A. from the University of Missouri, and a B.A. from Stephens College.

Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. His poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds degrees in creative writing and music from Oberlin College and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Santiago is also a percussionist and amateur jazz pianist. He teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas.

John Muellner is a queer poet living in suburban Minnesota who graduated from the MA Creative Writing & Publishing Program at the University of St. Thomas in 2022. His work can be found, or will soon be found, online in Gertrude Press, Court Green, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Indicia, River River and more.

Hayley Graffunder is a contributing managing editor emerita for Blackbird. Hayley holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Occulum, RHINO, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2020 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, and the 2018 Lon Otto Prize for poetry. She earned a BA in English with minors in creative writing and linguistics from the University of St. Thomas, where she served as coeditor of the Summit Avenue Review.

11:45 – 12:45 pm: Poetry and Craft Workshop with Katrina Vandenberg

Our final session of the institute will be a short poetry writing workshop and craft talk led by Katrina Vandenberg.

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poems, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World and Atlas, and co-author of the chapbook On Marriage. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The American Scholar, Orion, Post Road, Poets and Writers, and other magazines. She has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Fulbright Foundations; been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; and held residencies at the Amy Clampitt House, the Poetry Center of Chicago, and the MacDowell Colony. She is the poetry editor of Water~Stone Review and a professor in The Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

This event will be held in the 3M Auditorium of the Owens Science Hall on the University of St. Thomas’ south campus in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Parking is available free of charge in the adjacent Anderson Parking Facility on the corner of Cretin and Grand Avenues.