Hosted by the Wilkes University English Department, the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring
Writers Series features a variety of authors, poets, directors and other accomplished
writers annually. Guest speakers frequently read selections of their works and answer
questions at the event.
All events are free and open to the public.
Upcoming Guest Artists
Idra Novey
Feb 25, 7:30 p.m. | Kirby Hall Salon
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet and translator. Her most recent novel, Take What You Need, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, longlisted for
the Dublin Literary Award, chosen as a Barnes & Noble Fiction Pick and named a Best
Book of the Year with The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, NPR, Today and Yiyun Li's Author Pick at The Guardian.
Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, was a winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Public Library Prize and the Sami Rohr Prize.
In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Glacier," published in The Yale Review. Her new book of poems, Soon and Wholly, was selected as a 2024 Poetry Foundation Staff Pick and named one of Electric Literature's
Best Poetry Books of 2024. She teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing
Program.
Helena D. Lewis, DSW
Mar 18, 7 p.m. | Kirby Hall Salon
Helena D. Lewis is an award-winning actress, poet and playwright. Her one-person show
“Call Me Crazy: Diary of A Mad Social Worker,” featuring 25 characters and chronicling
her work in the social service field, won the AUDELCO 2014 Best Solo-Performance Award,
Best Short at the Downtown Urban Theater Festival in New York and was Festival Pick
at the inaugural DC Black Theater Festival. She has performed at numerous universities
and colleges across the country and has been featured in the award-winning series
Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. In 2019, she received the EMART Theater Services award for her contributions to Black
Theater and social work.
She earned her doctorate in social work from Rutgers University and is also a licensed
clinical social worker, a licensed clinical alcohol drug counselor and a certified
HIV/AIDS health educator. She is currently the substance abuse treatment director
for a 51-bed facility for women inmates.
George Saunders
Apr 15, 7 p.m. | Dorothy Dickson Darte Center
Registration Required
George Saunders is the author of twelve books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. His short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for
the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (for best short story collection).
He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence
in the short story and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s
100 most influential people by Time magazine.
He has a degree in geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as
a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills
and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative
Writing Program at Syracuse University.
Past Guest Artists
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is an internationally beloved cartoonist whose darkly humorous graphic
memoirs, astute writing and evocative drawing have forged an unlikely intimacy with
a wide and disparate range of readers.
For twenty-five years Alison self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For. The award-winning generational chronicle has been called “one of the pre-eminent
oeuvres in the comics genre, period” by Ms. Magazine. From the strip was born the now famous “Bechdel Test,” which measures
gender bias in film.
Leah Vernon
Leah Vernon, also known as Leah V, is an international plus-size Hijabi model, award-winning
author, inclusive content creator, body-positive activist and inclusion consultant.
Her content has garnered over four million views combined and her face has been plastered
on billboards in Times Square.
Daniel Torday
Daniel Torday is the author of three novels: The Last Flight of Poxl West, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and an International Dublin Literary
Award nominee; Boomer1 and The 12th Commandment.
Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption
might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling
conclusion, Torday’s most recent, The 12th Commandment, is a brilliant new work. Entertainment Weekly describes Boomer1 as “A “sharp, funny take on the divide between baby boomers and millennials.” NPR
describes The Last Flight of Poxl West as a “WWII novel-memoir” which shows us “how memoir and fiction can blur—and how hard
it can be to convey truth.”
Amy E. Earhart
Amy E. Earhart is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty of Africana
Studies at Texas A&M University. A 2020 Texas A&M University Presidential Impact Fellow
and a 2019 Texas A&M University Arts & Humanities Fellow, Earhart has participated
in grants and fellowship received from the NEH, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation. In
2020, Earhart received a NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for her book
length digital project "Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American
Literature."
Ann E. Wallace, PhD
Ann E. Wallace, PhD, is Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. A survivor of ovarian
cancer, woman with multiple sclerosis and COVID longhauler, she has written across
multiple genres, from poetry to creative nonfiction to literary scholarship, on the
experience and rhetoric of illness.
Zakes Mda
Zakes Mda is a South African and American-African Appalachian writer, painter and
music composer. He has published 24 books, including 11 novels, plus collections of
plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theater-for-development.
Mda’s writings have been translated into 22 languages. His paintings have been exhibited
in South Africa, Lesotho and the U.S. and are in collections in those countries, as
well as Spain and Sweden.
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood has been sharing the power of the written word since publication of
her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. She has crafted more than 50 volumes of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and
children’s literature. The critically acclaimed television version of her 1985 novel
The Handmaid’s Tale earned 54 Emmy nominations and 15 awards. The series has been renewed for a fifth
season. The
dystopian work’s follow-up novel, The Testaments, sold out its initial half-million copy run, requiring two additional printings in
just over a week and breaking first-day sales records for Penguin Random House titles
that year.
Jason Schneiderman
Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals
and anthologies. Schneiderman is a longstanding co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is an associate
professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in
the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Richard Boada
Richard Boada is author of three poetry collections: We Find Each Other in the Darkness (Texas Review Press), The Error of Nostalgia (Texas Review Press), and Archipelago Sinking (Finishing Line Press). He has been a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts
and Letters Poetry Book Prize and is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission
Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Urban Voices: 51 Poets/51 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Third Coast and the North American Review among others. He teaches for the West Virginia Wesleyan College Low Residency MFA
Program and Lane College.
Howard Norman
Lannan Award winner Howard Norman is a novelist, memoirist, and children’s author.
His works include the memoir I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place and the novel The Ghost Clause. His books have been translated into fourteen languages and awarded the Harold Morton
Landon Prize in Translation from the Academy of American Poets.
Poupeh Missaghi
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, educator, translator of Persian and the Iran editor-at-large
for Asymptotejournal.com. Her works of nonfiction, fiction and translations have appeared
in numerous journals and she has several books of translation published in Iran.
Zach Linge
Zach Linge’s poems appear in AGNI, Best New Poets 2020, New England Review, Poetry
and elsewhere. Their second refereed article was published in a special issue of African
American Review on the works of Percival Everett.
Alice Sola Kim
Alice Sola Kim’s writing has appeared in publications such as The Cut, Tin House,
McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. She
has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the MacDowell
Colony and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and won a 2016 Whiting Award.
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of multiple books, including Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle, A Hologram for the King and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Alex Burns
Alex Burns is the founding artistic director of Quintessence Theatre Group, an ensemble
theater dedicated to the performance and adaptation of epic works of classic literature
and drama in Philadelphia.
Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner wrote three books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path), two novels (Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04) and several collaborations with artists (including Blossom, with Thomas Demand). He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim
and MacArthur foundations, among other awards.
Jean McGarry
Jean McGarry's professional experience includes author, newspaper reporter, translator
and university professor. McGarry’s stories have appeared in The Yale Review, Southwest Review and The New Yorker, among others.
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli won the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction 2016. Her works have appeared
in 14 languages and multiple publications, including The New Yorker, Asymptote, McSweeney and Granta.
Henry Veggian
Henry Veggian is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of North
Carolina - Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in boundary 2, Modern Fiction Studies, American Studies, Reader and Quaderni d'Italianistica.
