Writing Now, Reading Now Series

Fiction Reading by Snowden Wright

Tuesday, February 24, Reception at 5:30 pm /Reading at 6 

Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.

Wright was the Visiting Writer and Prose Faculty at the 2021 Longleaf Writers Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. Recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship from the Carson McCullers Center, he has attended writing residencies at Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Tusen Takk, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His latest novel is The Queen City Detective Agency.

Poetry Reading by Diana Goetsch

Tuesday, March 31, Reception at 5:30 pm /Reading at 6

Diana Goetsch has written eight volumes of poems, including Nobody’s Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State, 2004), Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015), and In America (Rattle, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, The Washington Post and on National Public Radio. She is also an essayist and journalist, author of the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore (FSG, 2022), and dozens of columns and feature articles. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and The New School, where she was the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. Goetsch is a renowned teacher of writing, having served on faculty at numerous colleges and conferences, and her recorded online class “Actually Writing” has been taken by thousands of writers from five continents. She resides in New York City.

Poetry and Fiction Reading by MFA Graduates

Saturday, May 16, Reception at 1 pm /Reading at 1:30

Our 2026 MFA graduates will read selections from their final projects. Jack Anderson will read from his poetry collection, Texts to Abe Lincoln, Ifrah Fahim from her story collection, They Forgot We Are Human, Hannah Frey from her poetry collection, A Longer West Than Promised: What We Carried Across the Water, Jaclyn Fulscher from her novel, Broken Puzzle Pieces, Anna Pellerin from her novel, Saint Ellis’s Girls, and Padraic Riordan from his novel, The Parish.

Thank you to our program partners:

Our spring series is a collaboration of the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, English Department, Ulrich Museum, and Watermark Books & Café.