7:00pm ET/ 4:00pm PT
Come hear Kati read from Lightning Flowers alongside faculty readers Nayomi Munaweera and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and graduating Ashland MFA student Lisa Trumble. This event is open to the public and will be streamed live on the Ashland MFA Facebook page.
Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving A Life (Little, Brown Spark 2020). The book was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick and the Group Text Pick for November 2020. Named one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Fall 2020, it has been featured in People Magazine, on NPR’s Fresh Air, and on the goop podcast. Lightning Flowers was also named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Nonfiction Books of 2020 and shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Standefer’s previous writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at The Carey Institute for Global Good and a Fall 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at The Mesa Refuge. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and teaches at Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA program. Standefer currently lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.
Nayomi Munaweera's debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Prize for Asia. It was long listed for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and the Man Asia Prize, as well as short listed for the Northern California Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second novel What Lies Between Us was hailed as one of the most exciting literary releases of 2016 by venues ranging from BuzzFeed to Elle Magazine. The book was awarded Sri Lanka's State Literary Award for English novel.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s most recent book is Children of the Land: a Memoir, (Harper Collins). He is also the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), and Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize (Northwestern University Press). As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, among others.
Purchase faculty books at the Ashland MFA Bookshop store.
