Victoria Chang & Leslie Jamison: Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference Author Readings

Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference faculty members Victoria Chang and Leslie Jamison will give public readings of their work at Brevard College’s Porter Center on Friday, May 15, at 7:30 pm. 

Sponsored by the Transylvania County Library Foundation and Brevard College, The Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference (LGRWC) offers a unique creative experience for writers, exploring the theme “A Sense of Place.” Conference participants will work closely with award-winning writers Victoria Chang, Leslie Jamison, and David Joy. In addition, conference faculty will present public readings of their work on Friday, May 15 at Brevard College’s Porter Center and Saturday, May 16 at the Transylvania County Library.  Both events are free to attend and open to the community. Highland Books will be on-site with books for sale, and the authors will be available to sign copies after their presentations. Workshop attendees were selected based on applications submitted last fall; applications for May 2027 workshops will open in September 2026.

Poetry workshop leader Victoria Chang is an award-winning poet whose work explores grief, identity, memory, and the complexity of language with remarkable emotional depth and formal invention. Her poetry is known for pushing boundaries while remaining intimate and accessible, earning her a reputation as one of the most distinctive and powerful voices in contemporary American literature. Chang is the author of several acclaimed collections, including Obit, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Written in the form of newspaper obituaries, Obit reimagines the elegy, giving voice to personal loss and the quiet deaths of identity, relationships, and language. Her other works include The Trees Witness Everything, a collection composed in minimalist waka poems, and Barbie Chang, which investigates race, gender, and social exclusion with fierce clarity. Her latest book of poems, With My Back to the World (2024), received the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry, was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. In addition to poetry, Chang writes lyric nonfiction. Her hybrid memoir Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief was widely praised for its innovative structure and emotional resonance. A Guggenheim Fellow and former Poetry Editor of The New York Times Magazine, Chang also writes children’s literature and is the Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech, where she teaches.

Nonfiction workshop leader Leslie Jamison is a gifted writer whose work explores the strengths and limits of our shared humanity. Her writing has been called at once “profound” and “intellectual” and then “poetic” and “philosophical.” She’s often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, the inheritor of a great American literary tradition. Leslie’s collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, won the 2012 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, the New York Times, and Publishers Weekly. The Gin Closet, Leslie’s first book, was one of The San Francisco Chronicle’s best books of the year. In 2018, Leslie released The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, a book that seamlessly blends memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage. The Recovering chronicles how we tell stories about addiction, as well as the larger history of the recovery movement. Leslie’s 2019 collection of essays, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, was met with high praise and critical acclaim. Entertainment Weekly writes, “With this brilliant new collection…Leslie Jamison affirms why she’s the essayist of the moment.” In 2024, she released her memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, a fascinating and sometimes harrowing exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. Leslie also completed and published the novel Peggy in 2024, continuing the legacy of her friend and fellow author Rebecca Godfrey who passed away in 2022. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Leslie also graduated with her PhD from Yale University. She teaches at the Columbia University MFA program and mentors through the PEN Prison Writing Program. She has worked—for various stints, in various points—as a baker, an office temp, a juice barista, a medical actor, and an innkeeper. She currently lives in Brooklyn.