“You Were Watching From the Sand,” by Juliana Lamy Submitted photo

The University of Maine at Farmington will present short story writer Juliana Lamy as the second reader of the 2024-25 season of the Visiting Writers series. She will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 3, in The Landing in the Olsen Student Center on the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing with the author.

Juliana Lamy Submitted photo

Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida and recent graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop whose work captures the strangeness of place and space, the changing landscapes of home, and the uncertain ground upon which her characters walk.

Lamy’s debut collection, “You Were Watching From the Sand,” is a dynamic, often absurd, and mystical portrait of the oddities of everyday life in Haitian Floridian culture. The collection was the winner of the 2024 Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Literary Award in Fiction and was long-listed for the OCM Books Prize for Caribbean Fiction and the Carol Shield Prize for Fiction.

Of the novel, author Kevin Brockmeier writes, “Every sentence Juliana Lamy writes is like a match being struck. Not many authors debut with her clarity of vision, inventiveness and verbal agility, and I would wager almost anything that You Were Watching from the Sand will mark only the first chapter in an important body of work.”

A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Lamy’s work has been published in Gulf Coast Magazine, Split Lip and Salon Magazine. Lamy’s collection was featured in Edwidge Danticat’s recommended reading list in Elle Magazine, and she will be spotlighted at the upcoming Maine Literary Festival and Miami Book Fair’s ReadCaribbean series.

“You Were Watching From the Sand” is available for pre-purchase at the University Store on the UMF campus and Devany, Doak, and Garret Booksellers.

The UMF Creative Writing program invites students to work with faculty, who are practicing writers, in workshop-style classes to discover and develop their writing strengths in the genres of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Small classes, an emphasis on individual conferencing, and the development of a writing portfolio allow students to see themselves as artists and refine their writing under the guidance of accomplished and published faculty mentors. Students can pursue internships to gain real-world writing and publishing experience by working on campus with The Sandy River Review, a student-run literary magazine; Ripple Zine, a feminist magazine; and The Farmington Flyer, a university newspaper.