First Books Reading

About the event

The Walter Nathan Literary Initiatives hosts the annual Creative Writing event honoring debut publications. This year's lineup features four Creative Writing MFA alums with their first books: Emily Bright with the poetry collection Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood (North Star, 2025); Jordan K. Casomar with the young adult novel How to Lose a Best Friend (MTV Books, 2024); Kristin Collier with the memoir What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System (Grand Central Publishing, 2025); and John LaPine with the essay chapbook An Unstable Container (Bull City Press, 2025).

Register for this free event (registrants will be checked in by name). Presented by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English. ASL interpretation provided. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email Terri Sutton at [email protected] or call 612-626-1528.

About the speakers

Emily Bright

Emily Bright captures moments through poetry about becoming a parent in Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood (North Star). Her poetry collection This Ground Beneath Our Feet is forthcoming April 2026 from Holy Cow! Press. She is a weekend host at Minnesota Public Radio News, with weekly features “Art Hounds” and “Ask a Bookseller." Bright studied English at Williams College and poetry at the University of Minnesota (MFA). She co-wrote a textbook for teachers called Powerful Ideas in Teaching: Creating Environments Where Students Want to Learn, as well as a poetry chapbook, Glances Back. She lives in Minnesota with her family.

Jordan K. Casomar

Jordan K. Casomar is a Black prose writer from West Des Moines, Iowa. He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. He was the runner-up for The Pinch's Spring 2018 Literary Awards in Nonfiction, received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant in 2017, and is an alum of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Conference for writers of color. He currently lives in Washington DC with his wife and their two cats and works as a professional Dungeon Master and creative writing instructor for teens. In 2024, Casomar published the young adult novel How to Lose a Best Friend (MTV Books).

Kristin Collier

Kristin Collier is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program. She has been a recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board funding, a Jack Hazard fellowship, and a Yaddo artist residency. Her writing has been published with Oprah Daily, Fourth Genre, and Longreads and was recently anthologized in Coffee House Press’s American Precariat. She is an organizer with the Debt Collective and a visiting scholar and TREC community engagement fellow at Metro State University. Kristin lives with her family in Minneapolis. In 2025, Collier published the memoir What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System (Grand Central Publishing).

John LaPine

John LaPine is a Black biracial queer poet living and teaching in the Twin Cities. He earned his MA from Northern Michigan University in 2017, and his MFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2024. His work has appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review, Hot Metal Bridge, The /Temz/ Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Rhythm & Bones, Midwestern Gothic, Underblong, and elsewhere. In 2025, LaPine published the essay chapbook An Unstable Container (Bull City Press).