Visiting Writers Series

February 7: Ghassan Zeineddine

Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in the Middle East. He is the author of the story collection Dearborn and coeditor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging. His fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, the Arkansas International, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, The Common, Epiphany, FOLIO, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other publications. Zeineddine is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio.

March 6: Danika Stegeman

Danika Stegeman is the author the poetry collections Ablation, published in 2023 by 11:11 Press, and Pilot, published in 2020 by Spork Press. She’s a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and recently spent a 2-week residency in Marathon, TX outside Big Bend National Park. Her video poem, “Then Betelgeuse Reappears” was an official selection for the 2021 Midwest Video Poetry Festival. Stegeman received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University where she was awarded the Heritage Fellowship. She currently lives in Roseville, MN. Her website is danikastegeman.com.

April 3: Okezie Nwọka

Okezie Nwọka was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in Abuja, Nigeria. They are the author of the novel God Of Mercy. Nwọka attended Brown University, graduated with a degree in Africana Studies, and was a Dean Graduate Research Fellow in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They are on the executive board of Express Igbo, a nonprofit promoting Igbo language. They teach and live in Washington D.C.

April 24: Anya Liftig

Anya Liftig s a writer and a visual and performance artist. She is the author of the memoir Holler Rat and has had her creative work exhibited at Tate Modern and MoMA. Her writing has been published in the New York Times and Bomb. She has curated events at The Kitchen, the Center for Performance Research, and the Queens Museum. Liftig has had fellowships at MacDowell and Yaddo and was awarded Franklin Furnace and Mertz Gilmore grants. She lives in Connecticut.

September 20: Jai Chakhrabarti

Jai Chakhrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won a National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, which was a Good Housekeeping Book of the Month and was recommended by The New Yorker and the New York Times. His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space, received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.

October 18 Vickie Vértiz

Vickie Vértiz is an award-winning Mexican American poet, writer, and professor whose work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huizache, Nepantla, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Auto/Body, winner of the Sandeen Prize, and the collection Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, winner of the PEN America Literary Prize in Poetry. She has been a resident or fellow at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Macondo, CantoMundo, VONA, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Community of Writers. Vértiz earned her MFA from the University of California, Riverside, holds a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from UT-Austin, and teaches in the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara.

November 8: Gina Chung

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer. Born in Queens and raised in New Jersey, she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the novel Sea Change and a forthcoming collection of short stories titled Green Frog. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School’s Creative Writing Program. Chung's work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Idaho Review among others. She is an alumnus of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Sevilla Writers House, The Center for Fiction, Kweli, and Tin House.

December 6: Davon Loeb

Davon Loeb is the author of the memoir The In-Betweens, a Lyrical Memoir. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Camden. Davon is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus, and he has work published in the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Electric Literature, Catapult Magazine, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Joyland Magazine, and Gulf Coast Journal, as well as in anthologies, including Best American Essays, Harp in the Stars, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, and elsewhere. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Wigleaf Top 50, and Best of the Net. Davon is a husband, father, and teacher living in New Jersey.