Feb. 25: Good Thunder Reading Series Features Faculty Members

Thursday, February 25, 2021
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
First event

Mankato, Minn. – Minnesota State University, Mankato will host fiction writer Chris McCormick and poet Michael Torres on Thursday, Feb. 25 as the sixth and seventh writers who will virtually attend this year’s Good Thunder Reading Series.

All Good Thunder Reading Series events are free and open to the public, and this year the events will be held virtually. A registration link for the McCormick and Torres events is available at https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/92557798360. The passcode is 161359.

McCormick and Torres will begin by holding a  “Talk on Craft” from 3-4 p.m. Events will conclude with readings from 7:30-8:30 p.m.

McCormick is the author of “The Gimmicks” and “Desert Boys,” winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House and Ploughshares. He grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert, and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned his MFA and won two Hopwood Awards, he’s now an assistant professor of creative writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Torres is a VONA distinguished alum and CantoMundo fellow. In 2016 he was a winner of the Loft Mentor Series, received an Individual Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was awarded a Jerome Foundation Research and Travel grant. In 2019 he received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Loft Literary Center for the Mirrows and Windows program. He is a former Artist-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. His first collection of poems, “An Incomplete List of Names,” was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. Currently, he teaches in the Department of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

The Good Thunder Reading Series, in its 39^th year, is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

The 2020-21 Good Thunder Reading Series receives support from the Minnesota State University, Mankato Department of English, the College of Arts and Humanities, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, the Nadine B. Andreas Endowment, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment and individual donors. Additional assistance comes from the Emy Frentz Arts Guild and Barnes & Noble Bookstore at Minnesota State Mankato.

For more information contact Candace Black at 507-389-2680 or visit gt.mnsu.edu.

Minnesota State Mankato, a comprehensive university with 14,604 students, is part of the Minnesota State system, which includes 30 colleges and seven universities.