Visiting Writers

Spring 2025 Visiting Writers

Wednesday, March 5th from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Marianne Chan is the author of All Heathens, a poetry collection that revisits Magellan's voyage around the world and navigates the speaker's Filipino heritage by grappling with diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. All Heathens won the 2021 Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. Chan's second poetry collection, Leaving Biddle City, out from Sarabande Books in 2024, is a coming-of-age narrative that explores the Filipina American speaker's experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia. Her individual poems appear in Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, American Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and currently teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Fall 2024 Visiting Writers

Thursday, October 17th from 4:30-5:30pm in the Benes Rooms of HWCC
"Inside the Box with Ian Bogost: How to Live Playfully"

Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is the English Department's endowed Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecturer. This event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, October 24th from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Megan Pinto is the author of the poetry collection Saints of Little Faith, which engages with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness. Her poems confront these realities while simultaneously envisioning life as holy and the divine as capable of gentleness. Saints of Little Faith was published by Four Way Books in 2024, and Pinto's individual poems have appeared in Guernica, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, Storyknife, and the Peace Studio. Recently, she received the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review and was selected for the Poets & Writers 2024 Get the Word Out poetry cohort. An alumna of Ohio Wesleyan University, she lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Spring 2024 Visiting Writers

Wednesday, February 7th, 4:15-5:15pm in the Benes Rooms of HWCC
"What if Americans Had Listened to Black Women of the 1800s?"

Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell shares insights from editing the work of Harriet Jacobs while witnessing the Supreme Court's commitment to ending abortion access and limiting the right to vote. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. Despite facing obstacles typically avoided by white women and Black men, Jacobs published her life story in 1861. This work sheds light on the experience of a particular demographic—nineteenth-century Black women. In the process, it exposes American culture's fundamental beliefs as the nation built its foundation on treating Black women not as people but as chattels, moveable pieces of property. Using Harriet Jacobs as a case study, Mitchell shows how Black women were model citizens who could not vote. Even while enslaved, Jacobs exemplified the critical thinking of engaged citizenship. Her writing exposes the brutally inventive creativity of the nation's most vaunted nonfiction texts. Jacobs proves to be unequivocal: legal statutes exert very real pressure on her life, but they rely on the relentlessly reiterated fiction that she is not fully human and deserves no rights. Mitchell is the English Department's endowed Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecturer. This event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, February 29th (OWU Connection Day), 2-3:30pm in Merrick #301
"Body Work: The Power of Personal Writing"

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into seven languages and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred. A. Knopf. The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. She is a four-time MacDowell fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which named her the 2018 recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award. She co-curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is a full professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. Febos is the English Department's endowed Osborne Lecturer, and her reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, March 27th, 4:15-5:15pm in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Lydia Conklin is the author of the short story collection Rainbow, Rainbow, a collection of stories that celebrates the humor and depth of the queer and trans experience and works to engage elements not typically represented in queer literature, including liminal or uncertain identities, queer conception, and queer joy. They currently serve as an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University and previously held the Helen Zell Visiting Professor position in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They've received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Paris Review. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Following their reading, Lydia will offer a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, April 10th from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn's writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Initially specialising in Phenomenology and Visual Arts scholarship, they hold MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. They teach at Columbia University and live in New York with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz. Following their reading, Lars will offer a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Fall 2023 Visiting Writers

Tuesday, September 26th from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Aza Pace is a poet interested in eco-poetics, ekphrasis, and rewritings of myth. She often draws on Texas landscapes to explore how storytelling rooted in place can help foster a sense of common life in the Anthropocene. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse (now Swamp pink), New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and she is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at OWU. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Monday, October 30th from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

James Fujinami Moore's debut poetry collection is indecent hours (Four Way Books, 2022), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry and finalist for the Golden Poppy's Martin Cruz Smith Award & the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov's Science Fiction, Barrow Street's 4x2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, Jet Fuel Review, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has received fellowships from Poets House, Bread Loaf, and the Frost Place, and earned his MFA from Hunter College in 2016. Following his reading, James will offer a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.