Melissa Febos MFA ’08 is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa.
Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, 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. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and Pushcart Prize winner. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
This event is colloquium credit eligible.