Writing Now, Reading Now Series

A Celebration and Discussion of Four Books by Five Authors with KMUW’s Beth  Golay, host of KMUW’s Marginalia and cohost of its Books & Whatnot podcast

Tuesday, October 6, Reception at 5:30 pm / Discussion at 6

Jason Allen: Boys Without Fathers (Quiet Storm)

Jason Allen writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. For his novel, The East End, National Book Award finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell provided the cover blurb: “Every page is filled with wise insights about social class and the human heart.” Jason has since been nominated for an Edgar Award and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and his memoir, Boys Without Fathers, will be released in September of 2026. His poetry collection, A Meditation on Fire, is now with Black Lawrence Press, and he has published essays with Potomac Review, Salon, Literary Hub, and The Strand Magazine. Jason teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Wichita State University and lives in Kansas with his sweet rescue dog, Luna.

Rebeccah Bechtold: The Sonic South: Nineteenth-Century Plantation Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press) 

Rebeccah Bechtold is an Associate Professor of English at Wichita State University. Her research analyzes how eighteenth and nineteenth century American authors used sound to negotiate the social tensions impacting early American culture. Her work has appeared in Southern Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, and the New England Quarterly, among other academic journals. Her monograph, The Sonic South: Nineteenth-Century Plantation Literature, examines the influence of white listening practices on nineteenth century literary representations of the plantation South.

Fran Connor [co-author with Darren DeFrain]: No Choice But Action: The Kansas Postpunk Explosion (University Press of Kansas)

Fran is Associate Professor and chair in the English Department at Wichita State University.  His scholarship is interested in the materiality of text technologies – such as books, manuscripts, cassettes, or zines – and the impact these forms have on the cultures that produce them. He is an Associate Editor for The New Oxford Shakespeare and an editor for The Oxford Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe.

Adam Scheffler: So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright (Louisiana State University Press)

Adam Scheffler is the author of two books of poetry—A Dog's Life—which won the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest, and Heartworm—which won the 2021 Moon City Press Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Verse Daily, Rattle, Narrative, and many other literary journals. He is also the author of a book of literary criticism, So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright (LSU Press, 2026). Adam grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the English Department at Wichita State University.

Thank you to our program partners:

Our fall series is a collaboration of the English Department, Ulrich Museum, Watermark Books & Café, and KMUW.