The Hemingway Center Reading Series unveils line-up of renowned visiting writers

The Hemingway Center Reading Series unveiled their line-up of renowned visiting writers for Spring 2025. The list includes award-winning poets, translators, essayists and fiction writers. Free and open to the public, these literary events promise to be enriching for the Boise community.

Formerly known as the Boise State Creative Writing MFA Reading Series, the Hemingway Center Reading Series brings acclaimed poets and fiction writers to campus each semester. The visiting writers give readings and talks, sign books, answer question and meet with Boise State creative writing MFA students. Each reading takes place in the historic and beautiful Hemingway Center on campus.

The Literary Translation Society, a student organization, teamed up with the Hemingway Center Reading Series to bring two acclaimed translators, Dan Beachy-Quick and Matvei Yankelevich, to campus as part of the event series.

Spring 2025 Reading Series Events

About the visiting writers

Xavier Cavazos

Xavier Cavazos authored three award-winning poetry collections: “Barbarian at the Gate” (Poetry Society of America), “Diamond Grove Slave Tree” (Ice Cube Press), and “The Devil’s Workshop,” selected for the Editor’s Choice Award from Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award. Currently, Cavazos serves as a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, and teaches in the Professional and Creative Writing Program at Central Washington University. He hopes to conjure.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator whose most recent book is “How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing” (Michigan UP Poets on Poetry Series, 2023). His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently Interim Chair of the English Department at CSU, where is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Timmy Straw

Timmy Straw is from Oregon. Their first book, “The Thomas Salto,” was published last fall by Fonograf Editions, and their poems appear in Annulet, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Yale Review. With Ainsley Morse, they’re working on translations of the Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.

Hannah Brooks-Motl

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019,) and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, post-45, and in edited collections and anthologies from Cambridge University Press, Wesleyan University Press, and the New York Review of Books. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and PhD from the University of Chicago. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Kate Folk

Kate Folk is the author of the novel “Sky Daddy”and the short story collection “Out There,” which was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called “Out There” “a superb debut short story collection explores the uncanny and grotesque […] A bold, exhilarating display of talent.” Folk’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A recent Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received support for her writing from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco.

Matvei Yankelevich

A poet, translator, and editor, Matvei Yankelevich’s books include the poetry collections “Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt” (Black Square) and “Dead Winter” (Fonograf), as well as the translations “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” (Overlook) and Alexander Vvedensky’s “An Invitation for Me to Think” (NYRB Poets; with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the 2014 National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and Civitella Ranieri. In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse where he edited and designed books, periodicals, and ephemera for more than twenty years. Since 2022, he served as the editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation. In 2023 he founded the literary small press Winter Editions. He teaches translation at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.