Faculty Presentation: Asako Serizawa, Oliver de la Paz, Chiffon Thomas
Monday, June 29, 2026
5-7 PM
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us for a summer faculty artist talk and reading with writers Asako Serizawa and Oliver de la Paz, and artist Chiffon Thomas.
To join us virtually, visit our YouTube Channel and look for the “Upcoming live streams” section. The majority of our public events are available via YouTube live stream with the presenters’ permission.
About Our Speakers
Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and raised in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. Her debut book of fiction, INHERITORS (Doubleday), won the PEN Open Book Award and The Story Prize Spotlight Award and has been translated into Spanish and Korean. A recipient of grants from the US National Endowment for the Arts and the Mass Cultural Council, her work has been awarded two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and La Fondation Jan Michalski, among others.
Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books including The Boy in the Labyrinth (U. Akron Press 2019) and The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Press 2023) which was long listed for the National Book Award. He is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross.
Chiffon Thomas (b. 1991, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, collage, drawing, performance, and installation. He creates immersive, site-specific environments and forms that explore the adaptability of identity while interrogating systems of power. Drawing from his lived experience as a queer trans person of color, Thomas examines embodiment and social positioning through contorted figures, fractured compositions, and historical references. His assemblages merge abstraction and representation, combining anatomical fragments crafted through hand-building and life casting with reclaimed materials such as iron, glass, concrete, silicone, and fiber. His work portrays identities in flux, navigating intersections of race, gender, queerness, and spirituality.
