Every year the MFA program invites several prestigious writers to campus, where they lead workshops of student work and give readings to the broader community.

Here are the writers we got to work with for the academic school year of 2022-23:

Peter Markus

Peter Markus is the author of several books, the most recent of which is When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds (Wayne State University Press). Other books include the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, the collection of short fiction We Make Mud, and the book of non-fiction Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools. His writing has appeared in such journals as Northwest Review, Willow Springs, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, and Iowa Review, among others. He lives in Michigan where he teaches at Oakland University and is the Senior Writer with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit.

September 30th, 2022 at 7:30 pm at the Catalyst Building in Spokane, WA

Morgan Talty

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He is the author of the story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.

November 11th, 2022

Arna Hemenway

Arna Bontemps Hemenway is the author of Elegy on Kinderklavier (Sarabande Books), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Prize, finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories 2015, A Public Space, Ecotone, and The Missouri Review, among other venues. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently Associate Professor of English in Creative Writing at Baylor University.

November 18th, 2022

Rick Barot

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.  His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions and was longlisted for the National Book Award.  His earlier collections include The Darker Fall, Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord, all published by Sarabande Books.  Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award.  It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.  His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic,Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

January 20th, 2023
Spark Central, Spokane, WA

Dana Johnson

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Iowa Review and Huizache, among others. Her most recent work is Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California where she is director of the PhD in creative writing and literature program.

February 10th, 2023
Spark Central, Spokane, WA

Megan Cummins

Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, which won the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award for Debut Short Story Collection. The managing editor of A Public Space, she lives in New York City.

March 3rd, 2023
Spark Central, Spokane, WA

Jane Wong

Jane Wong is the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in May 2023. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Part of the Get Lit! Festival 2023

Emily Van Kley

Emily Van Kley is a queer poet and circus artist currently based in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of Arrhythmia (2022) and The Cold and the Rust (2018, Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize), both from Persea Books. Her poetry has received the Loraine Williams Prize for Poetry, the Iowa Review Award, the Florida Review Editor’s Award, and has been featured in editions of Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. Originally from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Emily holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has been awarded fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. When not writing, she can often be found teaching or performing aerial acrobatics.

May 2023

Stay tuned for Visiting Writers 23-24!

Every year the MFA program invites several prestigious writers to campus, where they lead workshops of student work and give readings to the broader community.

Here are the writers we got to work with for the academic school year of 2021-22:

Phong Nguyen

Phong Nguyen is a writer of historical fiction (Bronze Drum), experimental fiction (Roundabout), literary spinoffs (The Adventures of Joe Harper), alternate history (Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History), dirty realism (Memory Sickness), and more. Nguyen teaches fiction-writing at the University of Missouri, where he is the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing. He has edited volumes including Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master and Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology.

Oct. 29, 2021 at 7:30pm PST

Watch online here

Laura Read

Laura Read is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (BOA, 2018), Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (Floating Bridge Press, 2011). She served as poet laureate for Spokane, Washington from 2015-17 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.

Nov. 19, 2021 at 7:00pm PST at Auntie’s Bookstore

Maya Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller (she/her) was born in the walk-up apartment above her parents’ gas station on the Oregon Coast. She is the author of Rust Fish; Yesterday, the Bees; and the interdisciplinary collaboration, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts; recent prose appears/is forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Guesthouse Literary, and The Rumpus. Maya serves as Poetry Editor for Scablands Books, Associate Professor at Central Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty in Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA. Photo by Dean Davis.

Nov. 19, 2021 at 7:00pm PST at Auntie’s Bookstore

Rachel Yoder

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (Doubleday), which has been optioned for film by Annapurna with Amy Adams set to star. She is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. Her writing has been awarded with The Editors’ Prize in Fiction by The Missouri Review and with notable distinctions in Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is also a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio. She now lives in Iowa City with her husband and son.

Feb 11, 2022 at 7:00pm PST 

Click here to watch online!

Peter Markus

Peter Markus is the author of several books, the most recent of which is When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds (Wayne State University Press). Other books include the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, the collection of short fiction We Make Mud, and the book of non-fiction Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools. His writing has appeared in such journals as Northwest Review, Willow Springs, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, and Iowa Review, among others. He lives in Michigan where he teaches at Oakland University and is the Senior Writer with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit.

This event has been canceled. 

Isabel Yap

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has spent the past decade living and working in the US. She holds a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Lithub, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her debut story collection, Never Have I Ever, was published in 2021 by Small Beer Press. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is isabelyap.com

March 18, 2022 at 7:30pm PST

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel is the author of Fear Icons, winner of the inaugural Gournay Prize from The Ohio State University Press.

She has published prose in Shirley Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice reporting and many grants and fellowships. A graduate of the University of Montana’s Environmental Studies Program and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, she is an Associate Professor of English at Whitman College.

April 8, 2022 at 7:00pm PST at Auntie’s Bookstore

Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others.  Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program, at Breadloaf Writers Conference, The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program and at conferences, workshops, and graduate programs throughout the country. Her newest collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin) and her latest collection of essays is All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books).

May 6, 2022, 7:30pm

Lesley Nneka Arimah

Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Riverhead, 2017). Evocative, wrenching, and subversive, this dazzlingly accomplished collection explores the times that bind us – parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends – to one another and to the places we call home. Her short story, Skinned, published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 53, was awarded the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the  NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, finalist for the Aspen Prize, and named one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Time Magazine, Elle, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Millions, Nylon, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, it was also selected by the National Book Foundation as a 2017 5 Under 35 honoree. Arimah has also won an O. Henry Prize and was the Africa Regional Winner for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has received grants and awards from AWP, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and others. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award, Harper’s, and Granta.

Born in the U.K., Arimah moved grew up in both Nigeria and the U.K. before moving to the U.S. in her early teens, where she spent a decade in Louisiana before relocating to Minnesota. She is currently at work on a novel.

April 22, 2022

Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis is the author of two full collections of poetry: Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019) and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. He is also the author of the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016), coauthored with F. Douglas Brown. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse​, ​Mississippi Review, New England Review, ​New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. ​A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and for The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program.

June 10, 2022

In the midst of the pandemic, the MFA program worked to ensure that they continued offering their Visiting Writers Series by moving online.

The writers for the academic school year of 2020-2023 were:

Amy Tan

Amy Tan is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her best-known work is “The Joy Luck Club”, which has been translated into 35 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film. Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” “The Hundred Secret Senses,” “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” and “Saving Fish from Drowning.” She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled “The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings.” In addition to these, Tan has written two children’s books: “The Moon Lady” and “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat,” which was turned into an animated series which aired on PBS. She also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write. Tan is also in a band with several other well-known writers, the Rock Bottom Remainders.

Watch the Amy Tan YouTube Streamed Video Here

Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction.  Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.  Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award.  Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award.  Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, and in 2021 she received the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for “Flashlight.”   She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Watch the Susan Choi YouTube Streamed Video Here

A. Kendra Greene

A. Kendra Greene is an essayist, printer, and maker of artist’s books. She writes about collections and records radio essays and spends not enough time locking up wood type on a Vandercook proof press.

She began her museum career adhering text to the wall one trembling vinyl letter at a time. From there she went on to manage a collection of photography, costume a giant ground sloth, and keeps returning as a Visiting Artist at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Her work as an essayist started during a Fulbright to teach English in South Korea, and she earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and a Graduate Certificate from the University of Iowa Center for the Book under the auspices of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. She is Associate Editor of prose at the Southwest Review and lately a Fellow at Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab.

Kendra makes books and broadsides under the imprint Greene Ink Press, and occasionally Red Thread Press, while posters are done under the name Miniature Giraffe Press. Her chapbooks and broadsides are held in the special collections of Yale, Carnegie Mellon, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Miami, and University of Iowa, among others. Kendra’s writing is more broadly available in print publications like The Normal School, Field Working: Reading and Writing Research 4th ed., and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. Ephemerally, her zines can be found in the White Rock Zine Machine, for 25 cents a pop.

Watch the A. Kendra Greene YouTube Streamed Video Here

Todd Davis

Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry–Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry and has been anthologized in such books as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Bedford/St. Martin’s textbook, Approaching Literature.

His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor’s Prize, the Midwest Book Award, the ForeWord INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. More than 400 of his poems have appeared in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, West Branch, River Styx, and Poetry Daily. He teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis’ manuscript Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry. His poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Orion, North American Review, River Teeth, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, and Chautauqua among others. His poetry and prose have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference along with the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA at Indiana University.

Watch the Todd and Noah Davis YouTube Streamed Video Here

Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay’s favorite book of 2020. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She holds an M.F.A. from Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently at work on a collection of essays.

Watch the Zaina Arafat YouTube Streamed Video Here

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of “THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir,” which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and has been translated into ten languages.

They have written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications. They earned their BA at Columbia University, their JD at Harvard Law School, and their MFA at Emerson College. They are now an assistant professor at Bowdoin College and live in Portland, Maine, with an enormous puppy.

Watch the Alex Marzano-Lesnevich YouTube Streamed Video Here

Lina Ferreira

Lina was born and raised (mostly) in Bogota, Colombia and has since then been tumbleweeding aimlessly through the world. She is the author of “Drown Sever Sing,” and her ode to cannibalism can be found in the collection titled, “After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays.” She is a graduate of The University of Iowa’s Creative Nonfiction and Literary Translation programs, and her work has been featured in Arts and Letters, The Chicago Review, and Fourth Genre, among others. Her new book, “Don’t Come Back,” is published by Mad River Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press (January 2017). Ferreira is a recipient of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.

Watch the Lina Ferreira YouTube Streamed Video Here

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico to parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in suburban Los Angeles. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. His first novel, “Still Water Saints,” was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The book was released simultaneously in Spanish, under the title “Los santos de Agua Mansa, California,” translated by Lilliana Valenzuela. His second novel, “The Five Acts of Diego León,” was also published by Random House in March 2013. His latest book is “Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime,” published by Unnamed Press in 2019.

Watch the Alex Espinoza YouTube Streamed Video Here

Eman Hassan

Bicultural poet and essayist from Massachusetts and Kuwait, Eman Hassan is the author of Raghead, which was the recipient of a Folsom Award and named as the 2018 Editor’s Choice for a first collection of poems (New Issues Press, 2019). She recieved an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University, where she worked as International Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, and a PhD in poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she worked as an Associate Editor for Prairie Schooner. Eman is one of the founders of The American University of Kuwait and part of Zayed University’s start-up team (UAE). She is also a veteran of the first Gulf War, where she served as a medic-interpreter. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Aldus Journal of Translation, Blackbird, KUDZU, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mizna, Pilgrimage, and sub/Terrain, among others.

Watch the Eman Hassan YouTube Streamed Video Here

Head over to the Visiting Writers Page to learn about this years Writers!