The Georgia Review and the Athenaeum present a reading with Julia Elliott and Joshua Garcia at the Athenaeum. The reading will be followed by a book sale and signing. Free and open to the public. The event is supported by the UGA English Department, the UGA Special Collections Library, and the UGA Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection Hellions, winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and a Southern Book Prize finalist. Her collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, was chosen by Kirkus, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014. She also published the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, Reactor, Granta, and The New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and six hens.

Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project, and support from the Hawthornden Foundation. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. 

Please join us for an exciting night of poetry with the 2026-2027 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet Anne Boyer with Magdalena Zurawski! Free and open to the public.

Anne Boyer is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her works include The Undying, Garments Against Women, and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a Windham-Cambell prize, the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Judith Wilson Fellowship in Poetry at Cambridge, the CLMP Firecracker award in poetry, and a Whiting award. Originally from central Kansas, Boyer now lives in coastal Scotland and teaches at the University of St. Andrews.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom (Wave Books 2019) is her most recent poetry collection. The Operating System also released Zurawski’s poem/essay Don’t Be Scared as a chapbook in Summer 2019. Her essay Being Human is an Occult Practice appeared from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020.

CAS is a free after-school program for pre/teen students from local middle schools. The first run of the program was hosted in Spring 2022 and included participants from four different middle schools in the Athens area. The Athenaeum aims to host new iterations of the program every spring semester, with the program centering on the work exhibited in the gallery.
 
CAS is led by faculty and students in UGA’s Art Education program. Preservice teachers (undergraduate students who are preparing to become certified art teachers) enrolled in ARED 4060S: Art Education in School, Museum, and Community are mentored by faculty and graduate students to develop the program content and serve as the lead instructors for the 10-week program.
 
In Spring 2022, the program focused on sound and video art in connection with artist Lisa Tan’s installation of Dodge and Burn 2017 - 2020 July 4 in the gallery. Preservice teachers had an opportunity to meet with Lisa Tan and share in dialogue around the work, brainstorming possibilities for using the work as a catalyst for art making with middle school participants.
 
For the duration of the program, UGA students and middle school participants explored experiential and artistic concepts developed in Tan’s work—concepts such as failure, surprise, juxtaposition, multi-sensory experience, and more. Participants engaged in emergent inquiry of these concepts by experimenting with video, sound, narrative, and embodied art practices. Ultimately, the participants created their own works of video and sound art that showcased their unique interests and identities and shared these works in a celebratory film screening during the final session of the program. Beyond these art-focused aspects of the program, there were snacks, games, and outdoor explorations, and loads of fun was had by all!
 
Be on the lookout this fall for information about the Spring 2023 CAS!
 
The 2022 CAS After School Program was supported by a 2021-2022 Willson Center Public Impact Grant