Hosted by the Wilkes University English Department, the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writers Series features a variety of authors, poets, directors and others accomplished writers annually. Guest speakers frequently read selections of their works and answer questions at the event.
All events will take place in the Kirby Hall Salon unless otherwise specified and are free and open to the public.
2023 Guest Artists
Zakes Mda
Zakes Mda | South African and American-African Appalachian writer, painter and music composer
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.
More About Zakes Mda
Mda’s written work has won international awards including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the M-Net Prize, Sanlam Prizes (twice), The Pringle Award, the Sunday Times Literary Prize (twice), the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, Premio Narrativa Sud del Mondo, the University of Johannesburg Literary Prize and the American Library Association Notable Book. He is a recipient of Ikhamanga Order in Silver, a national award of the South African government.
He commutes between the U.S., where he teaches creative writing at John Hopkins University and is professor emeritus at Ohio University, and South Africa, where he is a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, running a project he established in 2000 with rural women, and a director of NeoZane, an animation film production company. He is also an Honorary Patron of the Market Theatre and the Jozi Book Fair.
Mda holds an MFA in theater and an MA in telecommunications from Ohio University, and a PhD from the University of Cape Town. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cape Town, the University of the Free State, the Central University of Technology and Dartmouth College.
Ann E. Wallace, PhD
Ann E. Wallace | Poet Laureate of Jersey City, NJ.
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.
More About Ann E. Wallace
Wallace has shared her experience with long COVID with a variety of media outlets, including Huffington Post, Good Morning, America, Fox News Radio and numerous literary journals.
Wallace is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she specializes in creative writing, illness narratives, disability studies and composition and rhetoric. She is author of the poetry collection Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019) and of a recently completed manuscript Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul. Wallace hosts and co-produces Saturday Morning Poetry for her local Native Plant Society on Instagram @npsnjhudsoncounty, featuring live interviews with guests ranging from local poets to bestselling authors. Her published creative work can be found at Ann E. Wallace's website.
Amy E. Earhart
Amy E. Earhart | Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, 2020 Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow.
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." She has also won numerous teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Achievement Award from The Association of Former Students and Texas A&M University.
More About Amy E. Earhart
Involved with digital humanities scholarship since 2003, Earhart's scholarship has focused on examining infrastructures of technology and their impact and replication of "race," building infrastructure for digital humanities work, embedding digital humanities projects within the classroom and tracing the history and futures of dh, with a particular interest in the way that dh and Black studies intersect. Her digital projects are constructed to expand access to Black humanities materials, as is the case with projects The Millican Massacre, 1868, DIBB: The Digital Black Bibliographic Project, and Alex Haley's Malcolm X: 'The Malcolm X I knew' and notecards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (a collaborative project with undergraduate and graduate students published in Scholarly Editing).
Earhart has published scholarship on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes a monograph Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (U Michigan Press 2015), a co-edited collection The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (U Michigan Press 2010), and a number of articles and book chapters in volumes including the Debates in Digital Humanities series, DHQ, DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le champ numerique, and Textual Cultures.
Her current book, "A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History and Technologies of Identity," is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. She is also developing a digital project, Infrastructures of Race, and editing the Civil War Writings for the Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oxford UP.
About the Allan Hamilton Dickson Writers Series
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.
Rivka Galchen
Contact
Dr. Mischelle B. AnthonyAssociate Professor/Chair Department of English
Wilkes University
Kirby Hall. Rm. 201
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(800) WILKES-U Ext. 4529
mischelle.anthony@wilkes.edu