Visiting Writers

Fall 2025 Visiting Writers

Wednesday, November 5, 2025 from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Martha Park is the author of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, an illustrated collection of essays exploring the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. Park received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University and fellowships or support from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Bucknell University's Stadler Center for Poetry. Her collaborative illustrated journalism won an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News' Insight Award for Visual Journalism. Her writing, graphic essays, and illustrations have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Spring 2025 Visiting Writers

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 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.

Wednesday, April 2, 2025 from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall

Todd Davis is the author of eight poetry collections, including Ditch Memory, Coffin Honey, Native Species, and Winterkill. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Indiana Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review and have been anthologized in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Bedford/St. Martin's textbook Approaching Literature. The winner of numerous prizes, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor's Prize, and the Midwest Book Award, he teaches at Pennsylvania State University's Altoona College. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, April 8, 2025 from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Milligan Room of Slocum Hall
Poetry Reading & Conversation featuring Aza Pace & Julia Kolchinsky

Aza Pace is the author of the poetry collection Her Terrible Splendor, which won the 2024 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize from Willow Springs Books. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas. She currently teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University in the English Department.  The reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, 40WEEKS, and PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist for the Miller Williams Prize. When the World Stopped Touching, a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in2027. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Fall 2024 Visiting Writers

Thursday, October 17, 2024 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 24, 2024 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.

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