9th Ave: An Evening with IAA

Presented in partnership with Litquake.
Join Us On Monday, April 8th at 7pm PST when we celebrate the Institute of American Indian Arts with a reading from and by students, alumni, and faculty here at [Green Apple Books]!

Featuring Jennifer Elsie Foerster, Ibe Libenberg, Tracy Abeyta and Jackson Taffa.

Masks encouraged for In-Person Attendance or Watch Online (livestream link is forthcoming, please check website link for information)

About the Readers
Tracy Abeyta is a third-grade dropout who didn’t get a GED but snagged two master’s degrees. After turning forty, she decided to write for real and has been published by Hobart Pulp, The Brooklyn Review, and Diagram. She is pursuing an MFA in Fiction from the Institute for American Indian Arts. She won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a finalist for the 2023 Sewanee Review Nonfiction contest. She teaches literature and lives in Oakland with a free-roaming lionhead rabbit named Betty who is two pounds but can eat a tunnel through a couch.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe-Bird, and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is also the Literary Assistant to the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.

Ibe Liebenberg is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. He lives in Chico, California and has worked as a firefighter with Cal Fire for the last sixteen seasons. He is a lecturer at Chico State University. He is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in both poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The ThreePenny Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, and a finalist of the 2023 James Welch poetry prize, Poetry Northwest. Winner of the Tribal College Journals 2023 student creative writing contest in both fiction and poetry, his poetry manuscript was a recent finalist for the 2024 Sowell Emerging Writers Prize.

Deborah Jackson Taffa’s debut book, Whiskey Tender, has received advanced praise from ELLE Magazine, “The Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Books in 2024,” The NY Times, “17 New Books Coming in February,” Publishers Weekly “Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10,” The Millions “Most Anticipated,” Electric Literature, “Books by Women of Color to Read,” San Francisco Chronicle “New Books to Cozy Up With.” With fellowships from the NEA in Prose, PEN America, Tin House, A Public Space, MacDowell, Rona Jaffe, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute, Deborah received her MFA in Iowa City. EIC at River Styx magazine, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and splits her time between Saint Louis, MO, and Santa Fe, NM. She is a citizen of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo.

Event Website: https://www.greenapplebooks.com/event/9th-ave-evening-iaia