Ramona Ausubel, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and Katy Simpson Smith

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AND LIVE STREAMING | Ramona Ausubel, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and Katy Simpson Smith will read from their recent books as part of the Writers Reading series.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born, and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her family. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett (MFA ’19) was born to an American father and Japanese mother. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. Her most recent book is American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland. Her novel The Tree Doctor was published in 2024.

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.