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The Center for Literary Arts is pleased to present acclaimed author Venita Blackburn, in a reading from her latest book Dead in Long Beach. This event takes place on Thursday, February 19, 2026, at Hammer Theatre at 6:30 PM.

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Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. Among various honors, she received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her highly acclaimed debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities lacking access to professional instruction: livewriteworkshop.com. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

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This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Lewandowski Family Foundation, and the College of Humanities and the Arts' Artist Excellence Programming Grant.