Visiting Writers Series

September 18: Manuel Gonzalez

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Manuel Gonzalez

Manuel Gonzalez is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he has taught writing at the University of Kentucky, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Gonzales currently serves as the fiction editor for The Bennington Review and as a contributing editor for American Short Fiction and One Story magazine. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

October 16: Karen Rigby

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Karen Rigby

Karen Rigby is the author of the poetry collections Chinoiserie, selected by Paul Hoover for a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and Fabulosa. A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her work has been supported by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and appears in Poetry Northwest, The London Magazine, Bennington Review, The Oxonian Review, Australian Book Review, and other journals. Rigby is a 2023 recipient of an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She was born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, where she lived until moving to the U.S. in 1997. She currently lives in Arizona.

November 6: Joseph Earl Thomas

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Joseph Earl Thomas

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, N+1, The Offing, and the New York Times Book Review. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

December 4: Steph Cha

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Steph Cha

Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy: Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. Cha is a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor. She is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, Cha lives in Los Angeles with her family.