Jamil Jan Kochai, Naomi J. Williams, Eve Imagine

On the 7/9/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Jamil Jan Kochai joins the show to discuss his upcoming reading at CapLit and his recent release, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Kochai details how his writing about Afghanistan and Sacramento grow with distance and in parallel to each other. He also discusses the writing process more broadly, and how that encompasses being a receptive learner. The next guest on the show is Naomi J. Williams, who further details the genesis of CapLit and their upcoming events. Williams discusses how CapLit goes about choosing novels that could be interesting as performances. She also shares praise for Priya Balasubramanian, who is performing at CLARA with Jamil 7/18/24 at 7 P.M. The last guest on the hour is Eve Imagine, who imparts on a conversation surrounding her recent release of autofiction, Body In Script. Imagine shares a section from her, titled “Heart Murmur.” She then outlines upcoming events, including a live reading on Facebook next Friday with Miriam Dorsett, and Rock Art by the Bay this upcoming Saturday.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Naomi J. Williams is the author of the novel Landfalls. Her short fiction and essays have appeared, most recently, in LitHub, Bourbon Penn, Electric Literature, the Brevity Blog, and the Sacramento Noir anthology. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories honorable mention, Best Horror of the Year recommendation, and artist residencies at Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Willapa Bay, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She’s taught creative writing at UC Davis, Sacramento City College, Saint Mary’s College, and, since 2018, the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. A biracial Japanese-American, Naomi was born and partly raised in Japan and lives today in Sacramento, California.

Eve Imagine is a writer living in midtown Sacramento. She teaches English at Sacramento City College Working to get her first novel Body In Script in more readers’ hands.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. 

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