The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series
Author talks and readings from some of the strongest voices in contemporary literature
Every year, the Distinguished Visiting Writer Series brings nationally and internationally recognized authors to the Phoenix metropolitan area for talks and readings, connecting local communities with the national scene. Each event is comprised of a reading, writer conversation and Q & A, and book signing.
This year:
Date: February 16, 2023
Location: Piper Writers House (Tempe Campus)
Writers: Cynthia Hogue & Wendy Barker
Cynthia Hogue is a poet whose most recent collections are Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017). Her tenth collection, instead, it is dark, will be out from Red Hen Press in April of 2023. Her third book-length translation (with Sylvain Gallais) is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Her Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). She served as Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day for September (2022), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Hogue was the inaugural Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.
Wendy Barker’s seventh collection of poetry, Glass, appeared from St. Julian Press in 2020. Her sixth collection, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fifth chapbook is Shimmer (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the '60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Other books include a selection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, Braziller, 2001) and Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Barker was a co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships among other awards, she is the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair and Poet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.
Date: March 3, 2023
Location: Changing Hands Bookstore (Phoenix)
Writers: Andrew Sean Greer & Amanda Eyre Ward
Andrew Sean Greer is the author of seven works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco and Milan. His latest novel, Less Is Lost, came out in Sept 2022.
Amanda Eyre Ward is the New York Times bestselling author of Sleep Toward Heaven, How to be Lost, Love Stories in This Town, Forgive Me, Close Your Eyes, The same Sky, The Nearness of You, The Jetsetters, and The Lifeguards. Her bestselling novels have been featured in People Magazine, The New York Times and more. Amanda publishes nonfiction in Travel + Leisure, the New York Times, Texas Monthly and more. Amanda’s work has been optioned for film and television and translated into fifteen languages. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Date: May 25, 2023
Location: Changing Hands Bookstore (Phoenix)
Writers: Tommy Orange & Debra Magpie Earling
Debra Magpie Earling is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. An earlier version of the latter, written in verse, was produced as an artist book during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.
Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, a multigenerational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. There There was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Pen/Hemingway Award. There There was also longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
