reading | thursday, november 7 | 7 PM | free
UNM Creative Writing Program presents Deborah Taffa
POSTPONED
Sadly, because of the dicey driving conditions, we are rescheduling the Deborah Taffa reading. We don't have a new date for you to put on your calendars yet, but we'll notify you just as soon as we do.
The UNM Creative Writing Program invites you to join them at FUSION | 708 on November 7th, at 7 PM for a reading from Deborah Taffa, author of the National Book Award Finalist Whiskey Tender: A Memoir and the director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). After the reading, Taffa will give a brief audience Q&A and sign books. Copies of Whiskey Tender will be available for purchase at the event.
Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.
ABOUT DEBORAH TAFFA
Deborah Taffa’s debut, Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award Finalist, has been named to best lists at Esquire, Oprah Daily, ELLE, and The Washington Post. With awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and the NY Summer Writers Institute, Deborah received her MFA in Iowa City. A citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the IAIA in Santa Fe, NM.
UNM’s English Department offers a full array of creative writing workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Undergraduate students may register for introductory, intermediate, and advanced workshops in all three genres. Additionally, they are invited to attend readings sponsored by UNM’s Masters of Fine Arts Program and participate as readers on Blue Mesa Review. Qualifying undergraduates interested in pursuing creative writing on the graduate level are encouraged to work with a faculty mentor on a creative writing Honors Thesis. And every fall undergraduate creative writers compete for the prestigious Lena Todd Awards, a small cash stipend and the opportunity to share their work at the Works-in-Process Reading Series.
UNM’s MFA Program in Creative Writing is designed for graduate students committed to pursuing the writing life. This three-year degree combines studio-based workshops in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction with craft seminars and coursework in literature, teaching pedagogy, and professional writing.
Quality bar service provided by Safe House Distilling Co. and Teller Genuine Vodka.
