Fall 2020 Visiting Writers Series Announced

Each semester, the Creative Writing Program welcomes six visiting writers—two each in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—to take part in workshops and craft talks with students in the MFA program and to offer public readings at Mason's Fairfax Campus.

We're pleased to announce our Fall 2020 Visiting Writers Series. Please note that specific dates and times for their visits will be announced later.

 

FICTION

Marjan KamaliMarjan Kamali is the author of two novels: The Stationery Shop and Together Tea. Shelf Awareness called The Stationery Shop “a powerful, heartbreaking story of star-crossed lovers and Iran’s political upheavals,” and the book became a Boston Globe bestseller, a Real Simple magazine Top Editor’s Pick, an Indie Next Pick, and one of Newsweek’s 30 Best Summer Books. Her debut novel, Together Tea, was a Massachusetts Book Award Finalist, an NPR WBUR Good Read, and a Target Emerging Author Selection. Her work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in two anthologies. She teaches writing at GrubStreet.

Laura SimsLaura Sims is the author of Looker, a 2019 debut that The Wall Street Journal called “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror.” An Indie Next Great Reads Pick, Looker was named a Best Novel of 2019 by Vogue, Esquire UK, CrimeReads, and The Star-Ledger, and a Best New Book by People, Entertainment Weekly, CosmoUK, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Southern Living, Popsugar, and other media outlets. Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Sims has been the recipient of a US-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship.

 

NONFICTION

Robin HemleyRobin Hemley is the author of 12 books of nonfiction and fiction, and is the Founder of NonfictioNOW, the world’s leading international conference in nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he returned to Iowa for nine years, to direct the Nonfiction Writing Program. A Contributing Editor to The Iowa Review and on the Advisory Board of Fourth Genre, he has many years publishing experience, including five years as the Editor of The Bellingham Review, where he founded The Annie Dillard Award in Nonfiction and The Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction. His most recent book is Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood.

Michele MoranoMichele Morano is the author of Grammar Lessons: Translating A Life In Spain.  Her work has been honored with fellowships and awards fro the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and others.  Her essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays and I'll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years Of Essays From Te Iowa Nonfiction Program.  She directs the MA in Writing and Publishing Program at DePaul University in Chicago.  Her book, Like Love, is forthcoming from the University of Ohio Press in September 2020.

  

POETRY

Dan Beachy-QuickDan Beachy-Quick is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Variations of Dawn and Dusk. Other collections include North True South Bright; Spell; Mulberry; This Nest, Swift Passerine; Circle's Apprentice, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry; and gentlessness. He is also the author of A Whaler s Dictionary, a book of interlinked meditations on Herman Melville s Moby-Dick; Wonderful Investigations, a collection of essays, meditations, and fairy tales; A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work; and most recently, Of Silence and Song, a collection of essays, fragments, and poems. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency and has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a finalist for The William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. In 2016 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Joan KaneJoan Naviyuk Kane has authored seven books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, most recently Another Bright Departure. Other collections include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife; Hyperboreal; The Straits; Milk Black Carbon; A Few Lines in the Manifest; and Sublingual. Her artistic interests concern the role of lyric and story whose urgency and vitality is carried forward into the present and future by contemporary indigenous writers. Kane has received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2014 American Book Award, the 2012 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and a 2009 Whiting Award.