The UNCA English Department will host a kickoff event for its Visiting Writers Series on Thursday, September 14, at 7 p.m., in the Blue Ridge Room of UNCA’s Highsmith Union. The evening will feature readings by poet Donika Kelly and nonfiction writer Melissa Febos.
Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry, and, Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood — which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and has been translated into seven languages — and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is a professor at the University of Iowa.
This event is free and open to the public.
