Northwest Missouri State University’s 2023-24 Visiting Writers Series will open with a night of readings by a Vermont writer and folklorist who also publishes poetry and produces podcasts.

The event featuring Gennarose Nethercott begins at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, in the J.W. Jones Student Union Living Room. It is free and open to the public.

A winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow, Nethercott tours nationally and internationally, performing from her works – often with a hand-cranked shadow puppet show in tow – and composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.

She is the author of the 2022 novel “Thistlefoot” and the 2018 narrative poem “The Lumberjack’s Dove.” Her other recent projects include the narrative song collection “Modern Ballads” and “Lianna Fled the Cranberry Bog: A Story in Cootie Catchers.” Her latest book “Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart,” a collection of dark fairytales and fractured folklore exploring all the ways love can save us or go monstrously wrong, is due to be released in 2024.

Her work has appeared in Bomb magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The American Scholar and PANK magazine, among other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center; Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska; and the Shakespeare and Company independent bookstore in Paris.

She also is the founder of the Traveling Poetry Emporium, a team of poets-for-hire, and she is an associate producer at Grim and Mild Entertainment, an audio production company dedicated to historical storytelling where she conducts supernatural and historical research for the Lore podcast.

For more information about Nethercott, visit www.gennarosenethercott.com.

The Visiting Writers Series is designed to enrich Northwest’s educational mission while promoting the values of community, civil discourse and self-expression. Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corporation, Green Tower Press and the Department of Language, Literature and Writing sponsor the series.

It continues later this fall with Anna Leahy and Jessica Reed on Oct. 12 and Kazim Ali on Nov. 2.

For more information about the Visiting Writers Series, contact Daniel Biegelson, the series director and a senior instructor of English, at dbiegel@nwmissouri.edu or 660.562.1266.