Readers & Writers Live: Jeff Parker and UMass MFA Students

About this event

Coolidge Museum. Writers Jeff Parker, Assemay Almazbekkyzy, Hiya Chowdhury and Edward Clifford will read and discuss their work as part of the Readers & Writers Live series. This event will also be livestreamed on the Forbes Library YouTube channel. Click here to view. About the writers: Jeff Parker is the author of several books including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal, the novel Ovenman, and the short story collection The Taste of Penny. His many collaborative books and anthologies include: Clean Rooms, Low Rates; Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion: The Poetry of Sportstalk; A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia; Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States; and The Back of the Line. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Tin House, and others. Parker teaches prose in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he is the Co-Founder and Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. He will read with three of his thesis advisees in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, followed by a conversation on the craft of writing, and an open question and answer session with the audience. Assemay Almazbekkyzy is from Kazakhstan and writes about impacted cultures (i.e., Kazakh) in impactful languages (i.e., English). She is currently in the MFA for Poets and Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hiya Chowdhury is a writer from Delhi, now based in Western Massachusetts. She is a Delaney Fellow in prose at the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst, and her work has previously appeared in The Adroit Journal, LEON Literary Review, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was named an Anthony Veasna So Scholar in Fiction by The Adroit Journal. Hiya is currently working on her debut collection of short fiction, which explores complicated intimacies in the modern Indian…

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