Past Guests

The Southern Indiana Reading Series presents a virtual reading and Q&A by Edgar Kunz, acclaimed poet, Thursday, April 11 at 4:30 p.m.  

Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, published by Ecco in 2023 and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and Tap Out, published by Ecco in 2019. This appearance is part of his Spring Fixer North American Tour where he will visit poetry centers and colleges in Chicago, Illinois, Nashville, Tennessee, Manchester, Connecticut, St. Louis, Missouri and Evansville, Indiana.  

Kunz has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The American Poetry Review (APR), and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College. 

“Kunz's reading gives the audience an opportunity to hear an exciting new voice, a presence that is helping define what contemporary Poetry is.” says Rosalie Moffett, Assistant Professor of English. 

Watch video here

Nov 11, 2021

Fall 2021 Guests to the Reading Series

The Southern Indiana Reading Series has another fantastic virtual event coming up. On November 11th, at 6PM CST we will be hosting two critically acclaimed authors: poet, Phillip B. Williams and novelist, Jessamine Chan. Each will read from their new books, after which there will be a Q&A session.  

The poems in Williams' second collection, Mutiny, "rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporan folk and spiritual imagery... Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward."

Of The School for Good Mothers, Leni Zumas, writes: “This taut, explosive novel is all the more terrifying because it edges so close to reality. With the story of one woman struggling to get her daughter back, Jessamine Chan spotlights the punishing scrutiny and judgment aimed at mothers everywhere—especially those who aren’t wealthy or white. Frida’s predicament embodies the fraught question so many women are taught to ask: Am I good enough?”

Phillip B. Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois and earned his MFA from Washington University, where he was  a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow. He is the author of the poetry collection Thief in the Interior (2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, as well as the chapbooks Burn (2013) and Bruised Gospels (2011).

A Cave Canem graduate, Williams is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is coeditor of the online journal Vinyl and teaches at Bennington College.

The Southern Indiana Reading Series will be hosting two stunning and accomplished writers: poet, Taneum Bambrick and novelist Jordan Farmer. Each will read from their recently published books, after which there will be a Q&A session. 

Fall 2018-Spring 2019 Guests

The Southern Indiana Reading Series is made possible by the Indiana Arts Commission; the Vanderburgh Community Foundation Alliance; and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Spring 2019 Guests to the Reading Series

Hanif Abdurraqib & Elena Passarello

Tuesday, February 19thPerformance Center
4:30 pm

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much, nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. Abdurraqib has multiple forthcoming books including a book on A Tribe Called Quest titled Go Ahead In The Rain, the new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don't Dance No Mo'.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Hanif's reading.

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her second essay collection with Sarabande Books, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was named a Notable Book of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and her first, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among others.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Elena's reading.

Meg Day & Marty McConnell

Wednesday, March 20th
Griffin Center
7:00 pm

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can’t Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). Day’s poems appear or are forthcoming in recent anthologies, including Best New Poets of 2013,  We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival edited by Andrea Gibson, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Meg's reading.

Marty McConnell’s first poetry collection, wine for a shotgun, received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award and the Lambda Literary Awards. Her second poetry collection, when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there, won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop, McConnell’s first book of nonfiction, was recently published by YesYes Books. She is a seven-time National Poetry Slam team member, the 2012 National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC) Champion, and appeared twice on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Marty's reading.

Matthew Graham

Thursday, April 11thGriffin Center
4:30 pm

Matthew Graham is the author of three previous books of poetry, New World Architecture (Galileo Press, 1985), 1946 (Galileo Press, 1991) and A World Without End (River City Publishing, 2006), and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Pushcart, the Indiana Arts Commission and the Vermont Studio Center. Graham is a Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. He will be reading from his new book of poetry, The Geography of Home.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Matthew's reading.

Fall 2018 Guests to the Reading Series

Chelsea & Mark Wagenaar

Thursday, September 27th
Griffin Center
4:30 pm

Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of Mercy Spurs the Bone, selected by Philip Levine as the winner of the 2013 Philip Levine Prize, and The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She holds a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of North Texas. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Cave Wall, Birmingham Poetry Review, and The Southern Review, and recent nonfiction appears in Grist. Wagenaar currently teaches as a visiting assistant professor at Valparaiso University. She lives in Indiana with her husband, poet Mark Wagenaar, and their two children.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Chelsea's reading.

Mark Wagenaar is the 2016 winner of Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Prize for Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining. His first two collections, The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising) and Voodoo Inverso, won UMass Press’s Juniper Prize and the University of Wisconsin Press’s Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, respectively. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, Tin House, 32 Poems, FIELD, The Southern Review, Image, and many others. Wagenaar teaches literature and creative writing at Valparaiso University.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Mark's reading.

Michael Martone

Thursday, October 4th
Traditions Lounge
4:30 pm

Michael Martone was born & raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is a professor of English at the University of Alabama and the author of several books, including Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Alive and Dead in Indiana, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, and Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins. His latest collection of essays, Brooding: Arias, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet, was released by University of Georgia Press in March 2018.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Michael's reading.

James Han Mattson

Thursday, November 8th
Kleymeyer Hall
4:30 pm

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in North Dakota. He has worked as a staff writer and editor for Pagoda Foreign Language Institute, the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, and Logogog–South Africa. His first novel, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, was an Amazon Literature and Fiction Pick, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a Publishers Lunch Bookseller Pick, a Kindle First Pick, a New York Post Required Reading, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Murray State University.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of James's reading.

Spring 2018 Guests to the Reading Series

Kaveh Akbar & Ruth Awad

Thursday, February 15th
Griffin Center
4:30 pm

Central Library
6:30 pm

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. His first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is just out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Kaveh's reading.

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from USI's Southern Indiana Review Press. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Nashville Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Ruth's reading.

Dan Chaon 

Thursday, March 29th
Griffin Center
4:30 pm

Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Dan's reading.

Fall 2017 Guests to the Reading Series

Casey Pycior

Thursday, September 7th
McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries
4:30 pm

Casey Pycior's debut short story collection, The Spoils, was published by Switchgrass Books in 2017. He was awarded the 2015 Charles Johnson Fiction Prize at Crab Orchard Review, and his work has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Harpur Palate, BULL, Wigleaf, and Yalobusha Review, among many other places. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Wichita State University and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Pycior joined the English Department at USI this Fall (2017).

Matthew Guenette & Maggie Smith

Thursday, October 12th
Griffin Center
4:30 pm

Red Bank Library
6:30 pm

Matthew Guenette is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Vasectomania (University of Akron Press, 2017), American Busboy (University of Akron Press, 2011), and Sudden Anthem (Dream Horse Press, 2008). He is also the author of the chapbook Civil Disobedience (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and reviews, and he has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Hessen-Wisconsin Fellowship. A graduate of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University, Matt currently teaches composition and creative writing at Madison College in Madison, WI, where he lives with his wife, two kids, and a 20-lb cat named Butternut.

Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, September 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems appear in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Plume, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

Spring 2017 Guests to the Reading Series

Annie Kim & Jenny Molberg

Wednesday, March 29th
University Center, Traditions Lounge
3:00 pm

Annie Kim’s first collection, Into the Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Mudlark, Asian American Literary Review, and DMQ Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA program for writers and the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the assistant dean for public service.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Annie's reading.

Jenny Molberg’s debut collection, Marvels of the Invisible, won the 2014 Berkshire Prize and is available from Tupelo Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, North American Review, Copper Nickel, The New Guard, Mississippi Review, The Adroit Journal, Smartish Pace, Zone 3, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Molberg holds an MFA from American University and a PhD from the University of North Texas. She currently teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is co-editor of Pleiades.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Jenny's reading.