Visiting Writers Series

February 5: Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, author, and PEN American award finalist for her debut story collection White Dancing Elephants: Stories, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. She has received several Pushcart Prize anthology nominations as well as fellowships from MacDowell, Squaw Valley/ Community of Writers, and Sewanee Writers Workshop. She has been a visiting writer for Yale University Summer Writing Workshop, Westchester Community College, UCSF Medical Humanities program, and the University of Rhode Island graduate writing program.

March 5: Torrin A. Greathouse

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Torrin A. Greathouse

Torrin A. Greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist and the author of the poetry collections DEED and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist. Her work has been published in POETRY, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. They are the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.

April 2: Ismet Prcic

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Ismet Prcic

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. He is the author of the novels Unspeakable Home and Shards, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of the Year, as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. He has received a NEA Award for Fiction and his work has been translated into nine languages.

April 23: Anna Qu

Register for Visiting Writer's Series Event with Anna Qu

Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Lithub, Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. She was a spring 2023 Shearing Fellow at UNLV's Black Mountain Institute. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal. Qu teaches at Catapult, Monmouth University and the low residency MFA program at New England College.

September 18: 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

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

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

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.