from The Convergence Zone is a series of author readings, and artist talks and performances, sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. It brings together sometimes peaceable, sometimes combustible, fronts of discovery and experiment. This series discusses and performs written arts in an expanded field. 
 
Gamut literary series provides opportunities to hear and see work from the diversity of creative voices within the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics community. The series features readings by current students, alumni, and faculty and is open to the public. The name “Gamut” refers to the MFA program’s interdisciplinary nature, which encourages and challenges students to experiment between genres and mediums, resulting in a wide range of creative works.
 
Please join us on Zoom for a presentation by Spring Quarter MFA Visiting Writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who will be joined by alum Travis Sharp (MFA ’15) and first-year student Farron Knechtel (MFA ’24). Students will spend 5 weeks with Sycamore this quarter, starting with tonight’s kick-off event.
 
Artist Bios:

Image credit: Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author, most recently, of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles (the latest forthcoming this year), as well as the editor of six nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018, and her anthology Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Sycamore’s latest anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, was named one of BookRiot’s “100 Most Influential Queer Books of All Time.” Her next book, Touching the Art, will be published by Soft Skull in November 2023.

 
Travis Sharp is a poet, essayist, book artist, and editor, with experience in teaching, publishing, and running non-profit organizations. He is the author of the poetry collection Yes, I am a corpse flower (Knife Fork Book 2021) and the poetry and essay chapbooks Behind the Poet Reading Their Poem Is a Sign Saying Applause (Knife Fork Book 2022) and Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press 2018). He is co-editor of a collection of essays about the 2016 US Presidential election, Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press 2017). His critical work focuses on textual and materialist sociopolitics and history and has appeared in Criticism and Discourse and Writing (Rédactologie). Outside of academia, he works in non-profit publishing as the executive editor and publisher at the small press Essay Press.

Farron Knechtel  is a multiracial genderqueer poet from the Seattle, Washington area and current MFA cohort of Creative Writing & Poetics at University of Washington Bothell. Their work concerns the beauty and absurdity of living in a hostile, binary world, and has been described by exactly one person as "dark eclectic." You can follow Farron at https://twitter.com/FarronLiamK.