October 11, 2023
2023-24 Visiting Writers Series Announced
Please save the dates, spread the word, and join the LC English Department in welcoming these four fine writers to our 2023-24 Visiting Writing Series. Bios and links to more author information below.
All four events will be held in the Frank Manor House, Armstrong Lounge, at 6pm.
Open gallery
Lisa Wells (Oct 23) is a poet and nonfiction writer who grew up in Portland. She is the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and a new collection, The Fire Passage, was recently selected by Diane Seuss for the Four Way Books Levis Prize (forthcoming in 2025). Her work appears in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and in Orion Magazine where she writes the column “Abundant Noise.”
Charif Shanahan (Nov 2) is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
Ama Codjoe (Feb 5) is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Codjoe is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Feb 20) is the author of the novel Gold Fame Citrus and the short story collection Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other prizes. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California Irvine and lives in Twenty-nine Palms, California.
