Writers Read Author Series 2024-25
Writers Read, sponsored by the Language and Literature Program, is a special event featuring authors who read from and comment on their work. Dates, times, and locations (map of EMU campus) are listed below.
jessica Care moore, author of We Want Our Bodies Back with guest Brad Walrond, author of Every Where Alien
Monday, September 23, 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. in Common Grounds
jessica Care moore is the founder and CEO of Moore Black Press, executive producer of Black WOMEN Rock!, and founder of the literacy-driven Jess Care Moore Foundation. An internationally renowned poet, playwright, performance artist, and producer, she is the 2019 and 2017 Knight Arts Award winner, 2016 Kresge Arts fellow, NAACP Great Expectations awardee, and an Alain Locke Award recipient from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Moore is the author of The Words Don’t Fit in My Mouth, The Alphabet Verses the Ghetto, Sunlight Through Bullet Holes, and the critically acclaimed techno choreopoem Salt City. Her work has been published in numerous literary collections and she has performed on stages all over the world, including the Apollo Theater, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the London Institute for Contemporary Arts. jessica lives and writes in a historic Detroit neighborhood with her son, King Thomas.
In his dazzling collection Every Where Alien, the poet, author, and conceptual/performance artist Brad Walrond traces blackness, queerness, and desire through the legacy of 1990s and early 2000s
New York City underground art movements, illuminating how their roots and undertold
histories inspire today’s culture. Featuring gorgeous, black-and-white illustrations
mixed in with the poems, Every Where Alien traces our common and conflicting identities to vindicate why human beings are always
greater than the sums of our parts. Walrond is a rebellious virtuoso wielding empathy,
grief, anger, and grit in equal measure. Every Where Alien is the first publication out of the joint program between Amistad and Moore Black
Press, the press for the radical black imagination.
Britt Kaufmann, author of Midlife Calculus
Thursday, October 24, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Martin Chapel
Britt Kaufmann lives and writes in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. Her gardens are larger than she can manage, but she enjoys listening to sci-fi audiobooks as she weeds. During the school year, she works as an in-class high school math tutor. Midlife Calculus is her first full-length collection of poetry which loosely chronicles the year she took calculus for the first time, at age 47, so she could cross it off her bucket list. Her previous chapbook belonging was published by Finishing Line Press (2011). Over the years, her poems have appeared in Scientific American, Kakalak, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Redheaded Stepchild, Now & Then, Pinesong, and SoftStar Magazine among others. Both of her stage plays premiered at Parkway Playhouse: Between the Tackles (2011), about three men who watch football together. and An Uncivil Union: The Battle of Burnsville (2012), a romantic comedy set amidst actual historical events during the Civil War. She is a founding organizer of the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and continued as a core board member for many years.
Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
Friday, February 28, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Martin Chapel
Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (2021), her debut novel. A film adaptation of her novel, written & directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams, is streaming now on Hulu. Formerly the 23/24 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she now serves as Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa. Selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021, Nightbitch was named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlist for the McKitterick Prize. Rachel’s stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process.
Christine Benner, author of The Height of Land
Thursday, March 20, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Martin Chapel
Christine Benner Dixon, Ph.D. (M.C. Benner Dixon) is a teacher, poet, editor, and novelist living in Pittsburgh, PA. A 2004 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, she spent roughly fifteen years in academia as a classroom teacher and scholar before launching her freelance editing and writing business. She also served as the interim executive director of Write Pittsburgh from 2023 to 2024. Christine's poetry and fiction tends toward contemplative melancholy, with occasional detours into the strange and creepy. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as Literary Hub, Reckoning, Flash Fiction Online, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. Along with poet Sharon Fagan McDermott, Christine is the co-author of Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life, a collection of hybrid craft-of-writing and personal essays about navigating life as a creative person. Millions of Suns is out now from the University of Michigan Press as part of their Writers on Writing series. Christine’s award-winning debut novel, The Height of Land, is scheduled for release in March 2025 from Orison Books.
Kirsten Eve Beachy, author of Martyrs and Chickens: Confessions of a Granola Mennonite
Tuesday, April 22, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Martin Chapel
Kirsten Eve Beachy lives with her husband, twin daughters, Sophie the cat, and a half-dozen unruly hens in Briery Branch, Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, disability, and changelings. She serves as director of the Core Curriculum and teaches creative writing and journalism at EMU. Kirsten edited the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror (Herald Press, 2010) and co-chaired Mennonites Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies, a bi-national writing conference at EMU (2012). Her stories, poems, and essays appear in Shenandoah, Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Cresset, Center for Mennonite Writing Journal, The Tusculum Review, Relief: a Quarterly Christian Expression, Rhubarb, Dreamseeker, and three anthologies: Hint Fiction (Norton, 2010), Mennonite Mothering (Demeter, 2013), and On Mothering Multiples: Complexities and Possibilities (Demeter, 2016). For more information on her current projects or to connect on social media, visit her author site.
