Our Reading Series presents free literary readings and discussions that are open to the public.
Tuesday, 24 Sept 2024, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium
Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming in 2025. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, The Black Mountain Institute, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Thursday 6 Feb 2025, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He was raised in Miami, Florida. If I Survive You is his first book.
Tuesday 8 Apr 2025, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium
Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include California Brown: Illuminations & Hollers; Every Day We Get More Illegal; Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: I Am the Future; SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. His book Jabberwalking, a children’s book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.
Co-sponsored by the English department and MFA program, the Emerging Writers Festival features two days of readings by five up-and-coming writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. On the second day of the festival, the authors hold a panel discussion on their experiences navigating life as a writer and the complexities of the publishing industry.
