The Gaines Center & Visiting Writers Series Featuring SHAYLA LAWSON & KEITH WILSON

Thursday February 6th, 2020

7:00 pm

WTY Auditorium

Shayla Lawson is the author of three books of poetry—A Speed Education in Human Being, the chapbook PANTONE and I Think I’m Ready to see Frank Ocean—and the forthcoming essay collection THIS IS MAJOR (Harper Perennial, 2020). Her work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, Salon, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, and MiPOesias. She curates The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and writes poems with Chet’la Sebree (pronounced Shayla, no relation). A MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, Shayla currently serves as Writer-in-Residence and Chair of Creative Writing at Amherst College. She is also supported by the Cini Foundation of Venice, Italy, the Allen Fellowship at the New York Public Library and her Havanese, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. She is a member of The Affrilachian Poets.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA fellowship as well as fellowships/grants from Bread Loaf, Kenyon College, Tin House, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, and Millay Colony, among others. Keith serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor at Obsidian Journal. His first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, was published by Copper Canyon. His work in game design includes “Once Upon a Tale,” a storytelling card game designed for Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in collaboration with The Field Museum of Chicago, and alternate reality games (ARGs) for the University of Chicago. He has worked with or taught new media with Kenyon College, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the University of Chicago.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and the Golden Poppy Award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Cenzontle was listed among one of NPR’s and the New York Public Library’s top picks of 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020.

Marcelo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign, which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major US first poetry book prizes and was recognized with the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing, he helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship, which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests for undocumented writers.  His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, New England Review, People Magazine, and Indiana Review, among others. He teaches at the Ashland Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and teaches poetry workshops for incarcerated youth in Northern California. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.

Randall Horton: 7:00pm 12/11/19, WTY Auditorium

Randall Horton’s past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently, a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, published by Augury Books/Brooklyn Art Press. He is currently Poet-in-Residence at Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the American legal system in Washington, DC. Horton is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which recently received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in Harlem, New York.

Chanelle Benz: Nov. 14, 2019, 7:00 pm, W.T. Young Auditorium

Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, was named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It won the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas Book Award for fiction. Her novel, The Gone Dead, was published by Ecco Press in June 2019. She currently lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author four novels, most recently An American Marriage, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection that appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and end of the year roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. With over 500,000 copies in print domestically, it has been published in fifteen countries. Jones, a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow was added to the NEA Big Read Library of Classics in 2016. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. Presented by the Gaines Center for the Humanities.