Join us for a reading from final year students in The Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project M.F.A. programs in creative writing at UT Austin. With an introduction from Leah Hampton and readings from Rachel Engelman, Hannah Kenah, Chessy Normile, Sarah Matthes, Raye Hendrix, Leah Dawson, and JT Howard.

Rachel Engelman is a third year fiction writer. She is increasingly interested in taking obscure women from history and making them do things that she wishes and hopes they might have done, including revenge, murder, and the burning down of nunneries to pursue wild sexual affairs. This is her first reading and she is completely terrified.

Hannah Kenah is a playwright and performer who has lived and worked in Austin since 2006. She is a company member of the Rude Mechs and of Salvage Vanguard Theater. She is grateful to the Michener program, primarily for bringing into her life her cohort of incredibly talented and supportive fellow writers turned friends; secondarily she is grateful to the program for moving writing to the center of her life and for expanding the genres in which she considers working.

Chessy Normile is a 3rd year poet at the Michener Center.

Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey. Her work can be found at the Iowa Review, Prodigal, The Feminist Utopia Project, and the Yalobusha Review, where she was a finalist for the Yellowwood poetry prize. She’s in her final year at the Michener Center for Writers, where she serves as Bat City Review’s Poetry editor.

Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Glass: Poets Resist, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Raye is in her final year in the New Writers Project, where she was a finalist for the 2018 Keene Prize for Literature, and where she serves as the Online Content and Web Editor for Bat City Review.

Leah Dawson is a fiction writer originally from Pittsburgh, PA. She is in her final year at the New Writers Project.

JT Howard is a MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin.