Writing Creatively in the Age of AI with Vauhini Vara (Virtual Event)

Creative Writing Now presents:

Writing Creatively in the Age of AI with Vauhini Vara (Virtual Event)

Tuesday November 4, 2025 | 12 pm PST | 3 pm EST | 8 pm BST

In 2021, award-winning novelist and tech journalist Vauhini Vara published “Ghosts,” an essay about her sister’s death written in collaboration with AI. The piece went viral, establishing Vara as a leading voice in debates on creativity and emerging technologies. Her 2025 book Searches blends memoir, journalism, and the raw material of internet culture to examine how technological capitalism both shapes and exploits human life. Esquire named it one of the best books of the year, and Anne Helen Petersen called it “the best book I’ve read this year” in her Culture Study newsletter. Vara suggests that by harnessing the collective creativity that defines us, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines—and with one another.

Vara will read from Searches, followed by a conversation with Professor Stephanie Young, head of the new Creative Writing minor at Mills College at Northeastern University.

All are welcome to attend this free online event. Students interested in the new Mills College Creative Writing minor and/or currently enrolled in MCNU Creative Writing classes are especially encouraged to join us.

This event is a part of the Mills College Endowed Performance Series Creative Writing Now, and is sponsored by the Office of the Dean at Mills College, Oakland Campus, Northeastern University.

Please email Stephanie Young, st.young@northeastern.edu, for any questions about the event.

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About Vauhini Vara: Vauhini Vara's debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her story collection, This is Salvaged, was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and won the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. For her body of work, she has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award. Vara has written and edited for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Businessweek, where she is a contributing writer.

About Stephanie Young: Associate Teaching Professor Stephanie Young is head of the Creative Writing minor at Mills College at Northeastern University. Young has published five collections of poetry and cross-genre writing including Pet Sounds, which won a 2019 Lambda Literary Award. Her scholarship has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, the Post45 Data Collective, Public Books, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. She is co-author of Crowd Control: Riot and Literary Reward, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics and is a member of the Krupskaya Books editorial collective.

About Creative Writing Now: Sponsored by MCNU's Creative Writing program, Creative Writing Now is a bi-annual speaker series at the intersection of writing, innovation, and global change. We invite speakers at the forefront of contemporary writing to explore the evolving role of storytelling in society, engage critically with emerging forms and technologies, and foster dialogue that bridges creative practice with pressing global concerns.

About MCNU's Creative Writing Program: In 2025, MCNU relaunched its historic creative writing program with a new Minor in Creative Writing. Available to undergraduates across the Northeastern campus, the Minor bridges the craft of creative writing with themes crucial to our future. Students hone their skills in a variety of genres with courses that explore creative writing for social equity and community resilience, expressing and celebrating identity, and writing for the commercial market. In workshop settings, students read as writers and apply editing and revision strategies to refine their own work and the work of others. In our innovative new course "Writing Creatively in the Age of AI," students learn to ethically and thoughtfully integrate frontier technologies into their creative writing practice, allowing them to merge the power of generative artificial intelligence with human insight, imagination, and inspiration.