Join Friends of Writers on April 28th 2024 at 7:30 pm ET for “Life’s Work: Balancing Work & the Writing Life,” a free and virtual reading and panel discussion, featuring alumni from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Panelists Rachel Brownson, Matthew Bucknor, and Kristen Sahaana Surya will read from their poetry and fiction and participate in a conversation about balancing the demands of work with their creative life. Representing a variety of professional sectors outside of academia, our panelists will discuss how they continue their life’s work post MFA.
FOW’s free and public virtual events inspire and connect our writing community. Each event is also an invitation to support the work we do through a donation of any amount. Your support allows our mission to reach farther and impact more writers. Support our mission here. Thank you!
Rachel Brownson is a writer, hospital chaplain, and clinical ethicist at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor. She has her BA in classical languages from Hope College and her MDiv from Western Theological Seminary. She is a board certified chaplain ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Rachel received her MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 2014. She was a fellow at the 2017 Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and her work can be found in Nimrod, Four Way Review, The Volta, The Collagist, The Toast, Shadowgraph Quarterly, and The Christian Century.
Matthew Bucknor is a physician and writer based in San Francisco, CA. He received his medical degree from Stanford and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is particularly interested in the intersection of narrative, health, medicine, and identity. In 2023, he received a Contributor Award to attend Bread Loaf and was an SF Writers Grotto Rooted and Written Fellow. His fiction has appeared in The Intima and Aaduna and has been recognized by Glimmer Train and The Sewanee Review. He is at work on a novel.
Kristen Sahaana Surya is 2022 graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Award for Emerging Writers, and her short fiction has been published in The Rumpus and Catapult. Kristen is also a practicing music attorney in the Business Affairs department at Atlantic Records.