Visiting Writers Series

Lily Meyer is a translator, critic, and author of the novels Short War (Deep Vellum, 2024) and The End of Romance (Viking, forthcoming). A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Lily holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati, and will be Princeton University’s translator-in-residence in Fall 2024. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, NPR Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Washington, D.C. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren is a poet, writer, and cultural organizer. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014) and Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017), the creative nonfiction book Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, winner of the Essay Press Book Prize (Essay Press, 2024), and the prose chapbook The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Society of America, and Poetry Daily. She lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina where she is the Founding Director of The School for Living Futures, an interdisciplinary, experimental organization dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She's received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y "Discovery" Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets and an Assistant Professor in the MFA at the University of California Davis. A former high school physics teacher, she has been a MacDowell Fellow, Kenyon Review Fellow, and Lambda Literary Fellow. 

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Maya Angelou Book Award. The Five Wounds was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, PBS News Hour, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, and Book Riot. Kirstin’s story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship, the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Stanford University.

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American animal, artist, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice. Born in 1989 in Groton, Connecticut, USA the artist lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!