The New Voices series brings emerging writers to campus to read with a University of Chicago student. The faculty chooses writers that have published one or two books. We have a separate event for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry. These are particularly special events for our Program because it is one of the opportunities for our students to showcase their work.
Wendy Xu is a poet, editor, and professor, most recently the author of The Past, published by Wesleyan in September 2021. Phrasis (Fence Books) was named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her debut collection You Are Not Dead (2013), was named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s Top 10 debuts. Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Tin House, Poetry, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere.Born in Shandong, China, she holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been on creative writing faculty at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Writing (Poetry) at The New School in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn, and serves as Poetry Editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic.
Yazud Brito-Milian (they/them) is a fourth year at the University of Chicago studying Creative Writing and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Yazud is a second-generation Mexican immigrant poet, essayist, and collagist born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They are currently based in Chicago, IL where they are invested in the intersections of arts learning and abolitionist policy and legal work. They work as a museum educator with the Smart Museum of Art, supporting their public practice team and K-12 tours. Concurrently, Yazud is a Mass Incarceration Working Group Fellow with the Pozen Human Rights Lab. Their poems have appeared in Blacklight Magazine and at Skidmore College's New York State Summer Writers Institute. They also make art with The Underground Collective, a collective of performers and multi-media artists on campus.