W & C Recent Guests

2022-2023

Amy Reed, Young Adult Fiction / Writer 
Thursday, November 17^th

Amy Reed is the author of many critically acclaimed contemporary young adult novels, including the award-winning novels, Beautiful (2009), Clean (2011), Crazy (2012), Over You (2013), and Damaged (2014). She has also published the two-book series Invincible (2015) and Unforgivable (2016), the novel The Nowhere Girls (2017), and the anthology Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America (2018). Reed’s feminist approach to YA fiction speak to contemporary issues important to young people including the climate crisis, sexual violence, drug addiction, class commentary, and mental illness. Her most recent book is the feminist, gender-swapped Great Gatsby adaptation and psychological thriller, Tell Me My Name (2021).

Carolyn Finney, Ph.D, Performer/Activist/Storyteller

April 6, 2023

Carolyn Finney is a storyteller, author, performance artist and cultural geographer who is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience.The aim of her work is to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, and increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action. Carolyn has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Canon National Parks Science Scholar and received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies. She has also worked with the media in many capacities and served an eight-year term on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board during which she assisted the National Park Service in engaging in relations of reciprocity with diverse communities. Finney is the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (2014) and many articles, performance pieces. She is currently artist-in-residence and the Environmental Studies Professor of Practice in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College. 

2018-2019

Alexia Arthurs, Fiction, Susan Glaspell Lecturer October 2018. Arthurs was born and raised in Jamaica and moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was twelve. A graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017. Arthurs is a visiting professor at the Iowa Workshop.

Vu Tran, Novelist and Essayist, February 2019

Dragonfish, Tran’s debut novel, was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His stories have appeared in The O’Henry Award Prize Stories and he teaches at the University of Chicago.

 Flash Fiction Trio: Grant Faulkner, Kim Magowan, Michelle Ross, April 2019

Faulkner: Author, Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of 100 Word Story. Magowan: Author, Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel Journal, Professor at Mills College. Ross: Author, Fiction Editor at The Atticus Review, Science Writer.

2017-2018

Devoney Looser, Jane Austen Scholar, Glaspell Lecturer October 2017.

Author of The Making of Jane Austen, a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book (Nonfiction). Looser is also a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar

Ocean Vuong, Poet, Feb 2018. 

Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 15 other languages worldwide. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Casey Plett, Essayist and Novelist, March 2018.

Casey Plett is a Canadian writer. She has won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction at the 27th Lambda Literary Awards in 2015 for her debut short story collection A Safe Girl to Love, and an Honour of Distinction from the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers in Canada.

2016-2017

Keise Laymon, Essayist and Novelist, Oct 2016.

Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, was just named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times (July 2019). Laymon also received the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction for Heavy.

Chigozie Obioma, Novelist, Feb 2017.

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Winner of the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Literary Work. Winner of The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Rekha Basu, Journalist, Susan Glaspell Lecturer, April 2017.

Basu’s columns are distributed nationally by Tribune Content Agency. She appears weekly on the "Rekha's Voice" segment of Great Day on KCWI-TV and is the author of the book, "Finding Her Voice."