News & Events
Recent Events
BFA in Writing Thesis Reading
May 17, 2025
Students graduating from SAIC’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing program read, perform, and otherwise represent their work in traditional as well as hybrid and experimental forms, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, scripts, electronic media, and performance.
2025 MFA in Writing Graduate Reading
May 16, 2025
Graduating students from the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program read selections from their work. Join us for a surprising evening including, but not limited to, fiction, nonfiction, and text off the page. Discover what writing becomes when students adapt the practices of their studio-artist peers.
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2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — CONFESSIONALS/POSTURES
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Featuring poems exploring intimacy and desire through the lens and subversion of gender and power with 2025 MFAW Graduates Sisel Gelman & Katie MacLauchlan
Katie MacLauchlan is a poet. Sisel Gelman believes in saving love through pessimism.
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — RETROGRADE/PROGRADE
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Featuring original narrative work and a brief Q&A with 2025 MFAW Graduates: Lori Hile & Kristen Lee
Have you or a loved one attended art school? Or have you or a loved one ever had a quarter-life crisis? During this crisis, did you apply to grad school? Did you also face trials and tribulations? And did you face unforeseen circumstances? Then this reading may be for you.
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — VELVET HEART
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Featuring hauntology, fiction, and a brief Q&A with 2025 MFAW Graduates Da Zhuang & Braxton Hay
Da Zhuang is an artist and writer from China, exploring the intersections of writing, publishing, and community engagement. Her artistic practice centers on storytelling and book arts, particularly creating artist books; while her writing mainly takes on the form of short fiction, often blending romance with eerie, unsettling elements. Zhuang was a recent Internship Spotlight through Art Connects Us!
Braxton Hay is a multimedia writer, director, and cinematographer from Michigan, with a focus on horror, neo-noir, and anything gothic. He is particularly interested in exploring hauntology, cultural memory, and vaporwave aesthetics. His short horror film “Jennifer Rots” (2021) screened at the Central Michigan International Film Festival and the Desmond District Demons Film Festival, where it won “Audience Choice”. He is graduating having secured literary representation for his thesis novel, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again (2025).
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — Madawaska: A Love Letter
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Featuring queer narrative, playwriting, and a brief Q&A with 2025 MFAW Graduate John McDonald
John McDonald is a queer playwright whose work with narrative form is all about relationship and power. There is truth in both of those things and playing with meaning and language isn’t just about wit, it’s about how we talk to and about each other.
Madawaska: A Love Letter is an examination of a beloved queer male painting by Marsden Hartley hanging at AIC, hidden in the corner. And what is hidden is the history of desire, discourse, and the difference between the closet and pragmatism.
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — ARMAMENTISM
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Featuring science fiction, tactical intimacy, and a brief Q&A with 2025 MFAW Graduate J. Robynn Armévida
Shaped by fragrance and video games, J. Robynn Armévida is a Chicana-Indigena transwoman, currently based in Chicago as a 2025 Writing MFA Candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Taking on “Armévida” as a nom-de-plume to honor the artist’s personal poetics of “armamentism” and their mother’s name, Armévida explores the gentle masculinity and visceral femininity of narrative. She has exhibited visual work in Chicago, Dakalb, and Dallas; collaborated in journalism, film, and editorial magazines as an illustrator, producer, and designer; and obtained a screw in her left knee to prove her past as a ballet dancer. In conjunction with Armévida’s creative path, her writing is heavily influenced by her identity as a sibling to an aerospace medic. Armévida is currently focused on creating a sci-fi trilogy.
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — BORDERS WE CARRY
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Marium is a South-Asian new-media artist, speculative fiction writer, and poet from Pakistan. Her writing emulates the rhythm of the only home she has known, and she uses speculative fiction to reimagine the history of her land to embrace what is yet to come.
Borders we Carry:
“Poetry and hybrid work that encapsulates the experience of existing in spaces that aren’t inherently meant for us. This is work that has been influenced in the last two years by living through a live-streamed genocide, leaving home and familiarity, and exploring the shared past through folklore and divination—all reimagined to allow us to write our truths. Our work and our politics are one and the same, and we speak as a form of not only resistance, but also joy and freedom.”
2025 MFAW Reading Series: Tour Jeté — BORDERS WE CARRY
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Featuring poetry, fiction, and a brief Q&A with 2025 MFAW Graduates Marium Asif and Israa Darwich
“Poetry and hybrid work that encapsulates the experience of existing in spaces that aren’t inherently meant for us. This is work that has been influenced in the last two years by living through a live-streamed genocide, leaving home and familiarity, and exploring the shared past through folklore and divination—all reimagined to allow us to write our truths. Our work and our politics are one and the same, and we speak as a form of not only resistance, but also joy and freedom.”
Marium is a South-Asian new-media artist, speculative fiction writer, and poet from Pakistan. Her writing emulates the rhythm of the only home she has known, and she uses speculative fiction to reimagine the history of her land to embrace what is yet to come. Israa Darwich is a Lebanese-American who writes poetry as resistance and protest while reclaiming her identity through her work.
