September 3: Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt is the author of two books, The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla, and The Seas, for which she was awarded a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Cabinet, Tin House, New York Magazine, Esquire, The Believer and on the radio program This American Life. Her play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of the Two-Headed Calf. Hunt teaches writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

September 17: Aaron Kunin and Laura Moriarty

Poet, critic, and novelist Aaron Kunin is the author of a collection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star, a chapbook, Secret Architecture, as well as a novel, The Mandarin, published by Fence Books earlier this year. Kunin teaches at Pomona College.

Laura Moriarty's most recent books are A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 from Omnidawn Publishing and An Air Force, a chapbook from Hooke Press. Other recent titles include Ultravioleta, a novel, and a poetry collection, Self-Destruction.  She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University and is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

October 1: Frederic Tuten

Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels including The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Tintin in the New World, and most recently, The Green Hour. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, The New Review of Literature and Granta, and his writing on art, film, and literature in Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. His short story, “Self Portrait with Icebergs,” was commissioned for the catalogue of Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition, “Celebration Park,” at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Tuten lives in New York.

October 22: Nathaniel Tarn

Poet, translator, and anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn has published over thirty-five books and been translated into over a dozen languages. His latest publications are The Embattled Lyric: Selected Essays & Conversations in Poetics & Anthropology, Selected Poems 1950-2000, The St. Petersburg Poems, and Scandals in the House of Birds. Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers will be published this year by New Directions, and the Ninja Press will release a newly rewritten edition of The Persephones. Tarn is Professor Emeritus of Modern Poetry, Comparative Literature and Anthropology at Rutgers and lives now near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Celebrating his eightieth birthday, Tarn will read new work and discuss his distinguished career with Otis Graduate Writing faculty member Dennis Phillips.

November 5: Molly Bendall and Jen Hofer

Molly Bendall is the author of three books of poetry, After Estrangement, Dark Summer, and Ariadne's Island. Seeing Eye Books recently issued a chapbook Windward, and her work will be included in the forthcoming American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of the New Poem. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Paris Review, Pool, Volt, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. Bendall teaches at USC.

Poet and translator Jen Hofer’s recent publications include sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a bilingual edition of books two and three of the lifelong project Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes, lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio, Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women, slide rule, and the chapbooks laws and lawless. Forthcoming are The Route, an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin, Laws from Dusie Books, and a book-length series of anti-war-manifesto poems from Palm Press titled one. Hofer teaches in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts and works as a Spanish-language interpreter with the Los Angeles County Superior Courts.

November 19: Peter Cameron

Peter Cameron is the author of the story collections One Way or Another, which was awarded a special citation by the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Book of Fiction, and Far Flung. His novel Leap Year originally ran as a weekly serial in the magazine 7 Days, and his second novel, The Weekend, was adapted into a feature film. Cameron’s other novels include Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination, which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and adapted by Cameron and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for film director James Ivory, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cameron has taught at Oberlin, Columbia, Sarah Lawrence and Yale. He lives in New York, where he works at The Trust for Public Land, a land-conservation organization.

December 10: Otis Books Reading: Signs /& Signals: The Daybooks of Robert Crosson

Celebrating the publication of Signs /& Signals: the Daybooks of Robert Crosson, a facsimile edition of the Los Angeles poet's life-long project of some 117 journals, in which everything—drafts of poems, personal correspondence, photographs, flyers, concert programs, work estimates for house-painting and carpentry, bills & every imaginable fragment of his life—finds its way into the “daybooks.” More than a writer’s journal, they are material “proof” of a poet’s existence, a careful record of his daily physical and intellectual life; and, as such, much more than his published titles, they constitute Robert Crosson’s life’s work. Signs /& Signals is first in a series of Otis Books/Seismicity Editions co-publications with the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD.