Annie Liontas

Sept. 17, 7 p.m.
Isaacs Auditorium

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors . Their work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review,
Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and other publications.
A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, they are a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system.

Sarah Cypher

Oct. 22, 7 p.m.
Isaacs Auditorium

Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine), an ALA Stonewall Honor Book long-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and winner of the 2024 Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others, and she has been a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center.

Karla Kelsey

Nov. 19, 7 p.m.
Isaacs Auditorium 

Karla Kelsey is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection On Certainty (Omnidawn Press), the experimental essay Of Sphere (Essay Press), and the poet’s novel Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions). A recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Fulbright Scholars Program and Yale University, she is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (Yale University Press) and the copublisher of SplitLevel Texts. She has been teaching in the creative writing program at Susquehanna University since 2005.

Clifford Thompson

Feb. 4, 7 p.m.
Isaacs Auditorium 

Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays , The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay La Bohème was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology . Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City.

Terrance Hayes

April 9, 7 p.m.
Isaacs Auditorium 

Terrance Hayes is the author of A merican Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin , winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Lighthead , winner of the 2010 National Book Award. His other poetry collections are So to Speak , How to Be Drawn , Wind in a Box , Hip Logic, and Muscular Music . He is also the author of To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight , winner of the 2019 Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Hayes lives in New York City, where he is a professor of creative writing at New York University.

Making Public: A Celebration of Publications and Literary Projects

April 15, 7 p.m.
Stretansky Concert Hall 

Alumnus Jason Ferris will return to Susquehanna University to give remarks at the annual student-run publications launch, which features the latest issues and award winners from Apprentice Writer , Essay , Flagship , RiverCraft, Sanctuary , and many more. As a creative writing and publishing & editing major at Susquehanna, Ferris’ works were published in RiverCraft and Essay , and in 2021, he won the Erik Kirkland Memorial Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the Small Press Chapbook Prize and the Gary and Elizabeth Fincke Outstanding Senior Portfolio Prize. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship, the James Patterson Writer Education Scholarship, and the Jeffrey & Kimberly Chapman Writing Fellowship. His work has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and chosen as a finalist in the 2021 Carve Magazine Prose and Poetry Contest. Ferris is a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and is working on his debut novel.

Refreshments and copies of each publication will be made available following the event.