Join BMI for a reading and conversation with Mia Alvar, author of In the Country, with 2024-25 Shearing Fellow Monica Macansantos. 

Mia Alvar is the author of In the Country, a short-story collection that won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize from the University of Rochester. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, One Story, The Missouri Review and other publications. Mia has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at Columbia University and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Her current novel-in-progress received a Project Fellowship from the City of Santa Monica, where she has lived and worked since 2017.

Monica Macansantos holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, and the story collection Love and Other Rituals. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2016. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and others.

This event is co-presented by Kwentuhan at Chikahan, a Las Vegas Filipino Book Club. The goal of the Club is to read and respond to the works of critically acclaimed Filipino authors, towards finding meaning in everyday struggles and triumphs.