Visiting Writers Series to feature award-winning poet, librarian

A critically acclaimed poet and librarian whose work explores Black identity, archives, history and politics will visit Northwest Missouri State University as the next guest of the Visiting Writers Series.

The 2025 Maya Angelou Award recipient, Alison Rollins will present her work from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in the J.W. Jones Student Union Tower View Dining Room.

Her most recent collection of poetry, “Black Bell,” was published in 2024. Her first, “Library of Small Catastrophes,” was published in 2019 and was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee as well as a finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize. In 2021, her essay “Dispatch from the Racial Mountain” was selected as the winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction. 

“Alison Rollins is a singular writer, a time-traveling virtuoso,” Daniel Biegelson, the series director and a senior instructor of English, said. “Her book ‘Black Bell’ weaves together past, present and future, showing how, as she writes, we ‘construct the architecture of tomorrow from today,’ and the ways in which the past is never, as is commonly observed, ever really past. What else can you say about a writer who places Dante and the Wu-Tang Clan in conversation, who mines the historical record to show us what is still speaking, still pulsing, still haunting, still frightening, still liberating?”

Rollins’ poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, New York Times Magazine and New England Review, among others.

A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, the Rona Jaffe Foundation’s Writers’ Award and a Pushcart Prize. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019 and was awarded a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2023.

Born and raised in St. Louis, she serves as an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also has worked for public libraries in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.

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

The Visiting Writers Series concludes this spring with GreenTower Press Chapbook Winner Anthony Robinson on April 16.

For more information about the Visiting Writers Series, contact Biegelson at dbiegel@nwmissouri.edu or 660.562.1266.