Writers Series

Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. He is the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) and If It Sounds Like a Quack… A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.

Thursday, Sept. 28th, 2023
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Oliver de la Paz

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board and on the board for Poetry Daily.

A recipient of grants and awards from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Poetry, and in anthologies and periodicals such as Asian American Poetry:  The Next Generation and in the New York Times. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

Thursday, Oct. 19th, 2023
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Diannely Antigua

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive that title. For more information visit diannelyantigua.com

Thursday, Nov. 9th, 2023
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Josh Barkan

Josh Barkan won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He has taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Hollins University and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)—named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His memoir Wonder Travels was published in the fall of 2023. He lives in Boston.

Thursday, Feb. 1st, 2024
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Marpheen Chan

As a gay, first-generation Asian American born in California to a Cambodian refugee family and later adopted by an evangelical, white working-class family in Maine, Marpheen uses a mix of humor and storytelling to help people view topics such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through an intersectional lens.

Marpheen Chann lives in Portland, Maine. He works in the nonprofit and advocacy sector and holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Maine and a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law.

Thursday March 7th, 2024
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Maria Hummel

Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize. Goldenseal, a novel, is forthcoming in 2024.

The winner of a Stegner Fellowship, Bread Loaf Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize, Hummel has been praised for fiction that is “savvy and lyrical” (Wall Street Journal) and “deeply affecting” (Los Angeles Times), and poetry that is “stunning… simple and deep, brimming with love and pain” (The Rumpus). Her other awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, and fellowships to Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center.

Thursday April 4th, 2024
5 p.m.
210 Hamilton Smith Hall

Brock Clarke

Brock Clarke is the author of nine books--most recently the novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? and the essay collection I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, Ninth Letter, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.