Literary Festival

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. With Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, she co-edited Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the U.S. (Paloma Press, 2023), offered as a companion to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). Originally from Baguio City, she makes her home in Norfolk VA where she is the Louis I. Jaffe and University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. She also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. Luisa is the 20^th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship.

Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans and raised in Pensacola, Florida. Wascom’s first novel, The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction and selected as one of Gambit‘s 40 Under 40. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.

Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award. Her second collection, Leaving Biddle City, was published from Sarabande Books in July of this year. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.

Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator and the author of three books of poetry, Curare (C&R Press, 2022), 2023 International Latino Book Awards, Silver Medal Winner; Reaper's Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018); and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). His work has won the Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize, nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in numerous journals, including The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Fugue, Hayden's Ferry Review, and The South Carolina Review. He received his MFA in 2015 from Old Dominion University and is currently based out of Oakland, California.

Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir, Made In China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and nominated for the 2022 Catalyst Award. Her essays have appeared in Threepenny Review, Lithub, Lumina, Kartika, and Kweli Journal, among others. She was a 2023 Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow and has received support from Yaddo and Ragdale. She teaches at New England College and The Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and she recently moved to the Denver area with her partner and their two cats.

Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013), shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017), winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press (2022). Her newest book, Room Swept Home, is a work of poems, historical and family photographs (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she resides with her husband and children.

Christal Brown is the Founder of INSPIRIT, Project: BECOMING, the creator of the Liquid Strength training module for dance and an Associate Professor of Dance at Middlebury College. Brown is a native of Kinston, North Carolina, where she remembers cleaning up on Saturday mornings as a child to the music of the Chi-Lites, Marvin Gaye, and Shirley Caesar. These rituals innately produced a strong desire in her to make all work melodic, sensual, meaningful and set to music. Brown has danced since she was released from the confines of piano lessons at age 9 and began navigating her way through narrow corridors of segregated understandings onto the stages of beautiful theaters, community centers, churches, classrooms, and cultural epiphanies. Brown has found the true meaning of grace.  Her path of self- discovery has been influenced by trailblazers such as Chuck Davis, Bill T. Jones, Andrea E. Woods, Liz Lerman, Bebe Miller and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Through these conduits of movement matter she was given the opportunity, permission, and responsibility to move and move others. She is a warrior of change and transformation, living out experiences her double amputee father recounted from his war-ridden dreams. The melodies in her body are melancholic and brought to life through the music, seen rather than heard through her choreography. Brown combines her athleticism, creativity, love for people, and passion for teaching to create works that redefine the art of dance and the structure of the field.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Kamara is the current Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of the full-length collection Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024), winner of 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2018) and When The Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017) and editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022). Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.

Rebekah Taussig will challenge everything you think you know about disability as she invites us into her experience of living in a body that looks and moves differently than most. “What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of the whole?” she writes in her memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body (HarperOne).

Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. Before pivoting to writing, speaking, and consulting, Taussig taught passionately for almost a decade from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes and continues to offer writing workshops.

She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of us.

A storyteller at heart with a great sense of humor, Taussig invites us to think bigger and more critically about who has a seat at the table and the barriers that bar others from inclusion. She’s held talks and workshops at the University of Michigan, Davidson College and Yale University on disability representation, identity and community, and her writing appears in publications from TIME to Refinery29. She’s been a guest on a myriad of podcasts and also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty, where she crafts “mini-memoirs” for her more than 50,000 followers to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. Taussig is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction for Sitting Pretty.

Topics:

• Rethinking What Accessibility & Inclusion Look Like
• Why Accessibility Is Important to All of Us
• Leadership: There is Nothing Artificial About AI — Access & Inclusion
• Healthcare: Transforming the Patient Experience

Devika Rege is a writer from India. Her debut novel, Quarterlife, is a political bildungsroman set in a time of rising Hindu nationalism. First published in South Asia, it was hailed as "a landmark novel" by The Indian Express. It was also a finalist for five literary awards and won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award and the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman for Best Fiction. It has recently been launched in North America by W.W. Norton, and will be released worldwide in 2025. Devika Rege is a graduate of the universities of Mumbai and Iowa, and lives in Bengaluru.

Manuela Mourão, a mixed media visual artist and professor at ODU, specializes in the literature and culture of the long 19^th century. Her art often probes issues explored in her scholarship. Whitewash (focusing on empire and racial identity formation), Remainders (using remaindered copies of her monograph Altered Habits), and Habit (a visual reflection on her academic interests) are examples of how her two practices inform and expand each other. From the Heart, her current project, is at the intersection of personal experience with academic pursuits. In a series of paintings referencing love letters of famous writers contextualized within the trope of Portuguese Love, she offers a visual counterpart to the affirmation of sincere feeling she examines in her latest essay—and which, she argues, has remained part of Portuguese cultural identity for centuries.

Originally from Porto, Portugal, Manuela has lived in the US for three decades. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues like the Vienna Kunsthalle, in Austria, and regionally at various galleries in Virginia, including Target Gallery, Art Space, the Selden Offsite Gallery, the Charles H. Taylor Art Center, Lorrie Saunders Art Gallery, Virginia MOCA, the Sandler Center for the Arts, the Gallery at Pavilion II, the Neil Britton Gallery at Virginia Wesleyan University, the Vestibule at Chrysler Glass Studio, and d’Art Center.

Her art has been featured in book covers, online journals, and is held in several private collections in the US.

Beth Nguyen is the author of the recent memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick, as well as the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and two novels. She has received an American Book Award and a PEN/Jerard Award and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Time, and Best American Essays. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Wine Dark Sea is a multi-instrumental folk American duo, featureing two ODU professors, Drew Lopenzina and Liz Black. We mix original compositions with a number of choice cover tunes that take audiences on a rich musical journey filled with guitar, mandolin, flute, harmonica, and concertina. Our songs touch upon current events, heartbreak, love, longing, laughter--inviting audiences to embark with us on our quest for meaningful, great-sounding, epic American music.

Bill Glose, a combat veteran and former paratrooper, is the author of five books of poetry and one book of fiction, All the Ruined Men, which won the 2023 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. A much-published writer in multiple genres, Glose’s honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award, the Heroes’ Voices Poetry Award, and the Dateline Award for Excellence in Journalism. He was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate in 2011 and featured by NPR on The Writer’s Almanac in 2017. His website (www.BillGlose.com) includes a page of helpful information for writers.

Jeff Schnader is an author living in Norfolk, Virginia. His novel, The Serpent Papers, published by The Permanent Press, is about the turbulence in America during the Vietnam War. The book won 2nd Place in the 2023 Independent Authors Network’s Grand Prize for Fiction of the Year and 1st Place in Outstanding Historical Fiction. It was also the Bronze Winner in the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards. Nominated for a Pulitzer, it was also named “Finalist” in several other competitions. His short story, “The Champion,” won 1^st Prize in the LUW Quills Awards. His short stories and essays have been published widely, and he has been interviewed on radio across the U.S. and in Europe. He has just completed his second novel, Star Chamber, for which he seeks representation.

Previously, he was a physician and Professor of Medicine, having graduated from Columbia, McGill, and Johns Hopkins. He has been a medical journal editor, research scientist, and ICU director, authoring 50 medical publications.

Andréane Frenette-Vallières is a French Canadian poet, essayist and researcher living in Québec. Her books, Tu choisiras les montagnes, Sestrales and Juillet, le Nord, are published by Éditions du Noroît and form a writing cycle marked by a feminist approach linked to north-coastal nature of Québec. Winner and finalist of many prizes, the most recent ones include Grand Prix du livre de Montréal 2023 and CALQ's Artist of the year. She regularly participates in public readings and round tables in Quebec, Canada and internationally (France, Morocco, Sweden). Along with her writing practice, she is pursuing a research-creation doctorate in literary studies at Laval University.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and the forthcoming Tall Water), and one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ authors through the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. More at sjsindu.com.

Geoff Bouvier has published three books of prose poetry, including the APR/Honickman Prize-winning Living Room. His newest book, Us From Nothing, is a poetic history spanning from the Big Bang to the near future. He served as the Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley and he has written long-form magazine journalism, publishing over 50 cover stories. His prose poems have appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and New American Writing. He currently teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Micah Nemerever is based in the Pacific Northwest. He was trained as an art historian, and he wrote his master’s thesis on queer identity and gender anxiety in the art of the Weimar Republic. Micah’s fiction and poetry have been featured in SLICE Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Reckoning, and elsewhere. His debut novel, These Violent Delights, published with Harper Books in 2020.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Take My Hand (2022) which was awarded a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, Fiction Award from Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship, Dolen is widely considered a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life.