2026 Visiting Writers Series

M.A. in Writing Visiting Writers Series & 28th Annual Poetry Day: Holli Carrell

28th Annual Poetry Day: A Reading by Holli Carrell: 7:00 PM - (Fermanian Conference Center)

Holli Carrell (she/they) is the author of Apostasies, winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize, the 2025 Last Syllable Book Award in Poetry, a 2026 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal, and a finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Poetry. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where she was a 2024–2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, as well as an M.F.A. from Hunter College. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Fence, Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She currently serves as the Assistant Poetry Editor at Acre Books.

Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, erasures, and spare, imagistic lyrics, Apostasies aims to recover and reclaim the body by its own definition. Casting her experience within the broader narrative of Mormonism, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation and grooming tactics used by Joseph Smith—Mormonism’s founder—on his thirty-three “wives,” many of whom were fourteen to eighteen years old at the time of their marriage. Courageous and defiant, the poems in Apostasies ultimately celebrate doubt and disobedience; they challenge oppressive constructions of womanhood and cisnormativity, in particular rejecting motherhood, “obedience,” and religious traditions that vilify independent thought and bodily autonomy.

All ticketing fees go toward M.A. in Writing program students attending conferences.

M.A. in Writing Visiting Writers Series: An Evening with Leyla King

Leyla K. King is a Palestinian American Episcopal priest and writer. She is a founding member of Palestinian Anglicans and Clergy Allies and The Small Churches Big Impact Collective. Currently, she serves as the Canon for Mission in Small Congregations for the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.

Leyla King has been a keeper of family stories since long before she sat down across from her grandmother with a tiny cassette tape recorder. And in this beautifully crafted memoir, she braids matriarchal memory into a vivid saga of love and survival as her ancestors flee war and poverty. From Haifa to Ramallah, Damascus, Beirut, and finally Texas, Leyla makes global politics deeply personal as family squabbles, ambition, mental illness, romance, and religion shape their immigrant journey. Narrated in immersive, lyrical vignettes, Daughters of Palestine is both an urgent testimony from Palestinian Christians and a timeless story of resilience.

M.A. in Writing Visiting Writers Series: An Evening with Patrick Hogan

Patrick Colm Hogan is the author of The Death of the Goddess: A Poem in Twelve Cantos (2014), a book-length, narrative poem based on Hindu Goddess myths, as well as lyric poems and short fiction, published in such outlets as Minnesota review, The Journal of Irish Literature, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, he is the author of twenty-seven scholarly and interpretive books, most of which treat postcolonial or world literature. Hogan has regularly taught courses in postcolonial literature (often with a focus on Africa), as well as courses on the pre-colonial and postcolonial literary traditions of India and China. In keeping with these interests, he has worked to acquire at least some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Mandarin, and Sanskrit. 

A People Without Shame is his first novel. 

A People Without Shame is an artistic triumph composed by a master craftsman whose courageous eye makes all too vivid the abundant horrors suffered by beautiful people and their culture at the hands of soul-dead colonizers eager to extinguish them. Patrick Hogan is – as Kurosawa says an artist must be – one who does not look away. Inside this grand and ambitious novel beats an urgent and epic dirge written with magic enough to awaken our collective humanity to the poetry preserved in the raging hearts of people whose stories refuse to die.

– Matt Cashion, author of Last Words of the Holy Ghost