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Visiting Writers Series
Every year the Department of English brings writers to Northwest's campus to read from their work. Contact Richard Sonnenmoser or John Gallaher for upcoming event information:
Amina Gautier
2/17/2011 (fiction)
Following in the footsteps of the late nineteenth century African American intellectual (Chesnutt, DuBois, Harper, and Hopkins) who merged both critical and creative talents, Amina Gautier's academic interests are two-fold. Her background as a scholar of 19th Century American literature and, more generally, African American literature, combines with her training as a fiction writer. More than fifty of her short stories have been published, appearing or forthcoming in Antioch Review, Callaloo, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and Storyquarterly, among others. Her work has been anthologized in Best African American Fiction, Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years, New Stories From the South: The Year's Best, 2008, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, and Voices. Her short-story collection, At Risk, won the 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award, and she is currently working on a monograph titled Wielding the Stronger: Charles W. Chesnutt and the Politics of Gender. She teaches at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
EJ Levy
4/8/2011 (fiction and nonfiction)
EJ Levy's essays and articles have appeared in many places, including Best American Essays 2005, The 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction; her essays and articles have been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Nation, Utne Reader, Salmagundi, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, and Orion. Writer's Digest named her among their list of "Twenty-Five Nonfiction Writers To Watch" in the new millennium. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, and two of her stories were recognized in Best American Short Stories among the year's Distinguished Stories. She has received a number of national awards for her fiction and nonfiction, including the Chicago Literary Award, a Loft-McKnight Fellowship, a Goldfarb Family Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Prize, the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Lambda Literary Award for her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Avon). She earned an MFA from Ohio State University in 2002 and a BA in History from Yale. She teaches at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
Carrie Adams/Kate Greenstreet
10/01/2009 (poetry)
Carrie Olivia Adams is a publicist at the University of Chicago Press. She is also the poetry editor for the small press Black Ocean and the journal Hunger Mountain.
She has published one chapbook, "A Useless Window," and her first full-length collection, Intervening Absence, is available from Ahsahta Press. Her poems and criticism have appeared in such journals as Backwards City Review, Cranky, DIAGRAM, Verse, and Lilies and Cannonballs. Her poem-films, "Pandora's Star Box," and "Winter Came" can be seen on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/carrieolivia (goodreads.com) Read her blog at colivia.blogspot.com.
Kate Greenstreet's second book, The Last 4 Things, is new from Ahsahta Press and includes a DVD containing two short films. Ahsahta published Greenstreet's case sensitive in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Find her new work in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, Fence, VOLT, the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, and other journals. See her website at kickingwind.com.
Diana Joseph
11/05/2009 (creative nonfiction)
Diana Joseph was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, the Rust Belt, land of Steeler fans and Terrible Towels. When she was a kid, she even had a tee-shirt with Mean Joe Green on it. His face is huge and he's holding out his fist and he's wearing his four Super Bowl rings. The tee-shirt reads, "One for the Thumb in '81." She knows people who still rave about the Immaculate Reception.
She attended Westminster College, where she majored in English, and her father kept asking, "What are you going to do with that?"
Her son was born in April of 1992; she graduated from college in May. She held that kid all the time, never letting his feet touch the floor. People said if she didn't put him down, he'd never learn to walk. She also enjoyed dressing him in little outfits: a black velvet tuxedo, a yellow tuxedo, M.C. Hammer-style parachute pants. Such a dandified wardrobe disturbed Diana's brothers, who, every chance they got, removed the offensive garments.
Between 1994 and 1996, Diana was a student in the MFA program in creative writing at Syracuse University. Upon receiving her degree, her father wanted to know, "What are you going to do with that?"
Diana moved to Colorado, where she taught English at Mesa State College. She failed to become a Broncos fan. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled HAPPY OR OTHERWISE, was published in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
In 2005, Diana moved to the midwest. She teaches at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her second book, a memoir titled I'M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY: THE ASTONISHING BUT TRUE STORY OF A DAUGHTER, SISTER, SLUT, WIFE, MOTHER AND FRIEND TO MAN AND DOG was published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam. She hopes you'll read it. You can check out her website at dianajoseph.net.
