Writer's Workshop Reading Series

Lisa Fay Coutley | Wed | Feb 9 | 7:30 pm | Criss Library and Zoom Event

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). She’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and Waxwing. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma | Wed | March 9 | 7:30 pm | Zoom Event

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at the University of Oxford, the Nordic Africa Institute, and Vassar College. Shadows, her novella-and-short-story collection, was published to critical acclaim in South Africa and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. In 2017, she received the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award for her work, and in 2020, she was awarded a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for distinctive literary merit. Her second novel, I Dream America, will be published in 2023 by W. W. Norton.

A native of Zimbabwe who has lived in South Africa and the USA, Novuyo has taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Emerson College. She has taught community fiction workshops globally, including in Bali, Indonesia, and Awka, Nigeria, at Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, most recently McSweeney’s, Ploughshares and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives edited by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.