Jill Talbot is our weeklong writer-in-residence. In addition to her public reading and craft talk, she will meet with undergraduate creative writers in the classroom and privately to provide constructive feedback and advice. […]
Jill Talbot is the author of The Last Year: Essays (Winner of Wandering Aengus Press Editor’s Prize, August 2023), as well as The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, a collection of personal essays. […]
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Poetry Foundation fellowship, and other honors. […]
Award-Winning Author Public Reading & ConversationThursday, October 3 – 7:00 p.m. Upper Gorecki, CSB Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/4th Estate), a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. […]
is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster from Torrey House Press […]
Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release is There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024). […]
Antonia Angress is the author of the novel Sirens & Muses, which was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2022 by Glamour Magazine. […]
A Public Reading & Conversation with Three Eastern European Poets This is an ARTE event. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. […]
Robert Glick is the author of the short story collection Two Californias (C&R Press, 2019) and an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. […]
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. […]
Diane Wilson (Dakota) is a writer, speaker, and editor, who has published two award-winning books, as well as essays in numerous publications. […]
Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas and has been making a name for herself in the literary world despite her relatively recent entry. […]
Renowned as a "poet of witness," Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Forché's first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. […]
Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. […]
Kiese Laymon is a powerhouse of a writer, whose fierce honesty necessitates that readers open their hearts and their eyes. Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, who is is the author of the genre-bending novel, Long Division, the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the bestselling memoir, Heavy. […]
Mai Der Vang is the winner of the LAI’s 2021 Sister Mariella Gable prize. Her book Yellow Rain is the 20th book in the series, a collaboration between the Literary Arts Institute at the College of St. Benedict and Graywolf Press, an independent press located in Minneapolis. […]
Minneapolis-based poet and graphic designer Chaun Webster draws from an interest in the work of sign in graffiti, the layering of collage, and the visuality of text. […]
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the winner of the 2020 Sister Mariella Gable Prize for American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf Press 2020). She is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. […]
As the first McNeely Creative Writer in Residence hosted by the Literary Arts Institute, Susan Steinberg is a novelist and the chair of English USFCA. […]
Poet, writer, and educator Sally Wen Mao received the 2019-2020 Sister Mariella Gable Prize from the College of Saint Benedict. […]
Shena McAuliffe Reading and Conversation October 24, 2019 View Recording Shena McAuliffe is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College and her work “The Good Echo” (2018) earned the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize. […]
Chris Abani is an acclaimed novelist, poet, essyist, screenwriter, and playwrite. […]
Spencer Reece is an ordained Episcopalian priest and currently works as a chaplain in Spain. His first poetry book, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Bakeless Poetry Prize by Louise Glück, and later adapted into a short film produced by James Franco. […]
Joyce Carol Oates is a National Book Award-Winning novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America. […]
Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, Registers of Illuminated Villages, extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. […]
Jamel Brinkley is the 2018 Sister Mariella Gable Award-winning author of A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books). His fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Epiphany, and LitMag. […]
John Coy is the author of young adult novels, the 4 for 4 middle-grade series, and fiction and nonfiction picture books. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Marion Vannett Ridgway Award for best debut picture book, a Charlotte Zolotow Honor, Bank Street College Best Book of the Year, Notable Book for a Global Society, the Burr/Warzalla Award for Distinguished Achievement in Children’s Literature and the the Kerlan Award in recognition of singular attainments in the creation of children’s literature. John lives in Minneapolis and visits schools around the world. […]
Kevin Young is the most recently the author of Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press 2018). He is also author of a previous book of nonfiction, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which won the PEN Open Book Award, was recognized as a New York Times Notable Book, and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. […]
Solmaz Sharif's Look is a powerful, innovative exploration of the language of war by a new poet of passion and conscience. It was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry, named one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 notable Books of 2016, a A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2016, a Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2016, one of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved" in 2016, and one of the San Franciso Chronicle's 100 Recommended Books of 2016. […]
Edwidge Danticat has received numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, the American Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. […]
March 19-21, 2017 Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poetry, including Cinder: New and Selected Poems, which is this year’s Sister Mariella Gable award-winning book, as part of an annual collaboration between Graywolf Press and the LAI. […]
Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. […]
Kimberly Blaeser, College of Saint Benedict class of 1977, is the current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. She is also a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures. […]
Solnit, writing out of San Francisco, California, is the author of 17 books with topics ranging from geography, community, art, politics, hope and feminism. […]
Eula Biss is also the author of Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays and The Balloonists. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers' Award. […]
Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer-prize winning poet from Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland. Muldoon is the recipient of a number of awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. […]
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Laila Lalami is an author, short story writer, and essayist who was born and raised in Morocco. She has studied at Universite Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College in London, and the University of Southern California where she currently teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her latest book, The Moor's Account was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Topics of her writing often include race, immigration, and national identity, and her work has been published in The Nation, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Her longer works include Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which is a collection of short stories about a group of immigrants attempting to move from Morocco to Europe in hope of a better life; Secret Son, which explores questions of identity and class; and The Moor's Account, a fictional account of the life of the first black slave in America. […]
Claudia Rankine joined the College on January 29 as the 2014 Sister Mariella Gable Visiting Writer and gave a public reading from her new book, Citizen: An American Lyric. Claudia has been nominated as a National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award in both poetry and criticism. […]
Marjane Satrapi visited the College of Saint Benedict on October 20. Born in Rasht, Iran, much of Satrapi's work is influenced by her experience during the Iranian Revolution and their imposition of Muslim fundamentalism. […]
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. […]
Larry Haeg Feb. 27, 2014 Many joined us on February 27 for A Conversation with Larry Haeg and Louis Johnston, a riveting interview with the author of Harriman vs Hill. […]
Ludwig Laher Apr. 30, 2013 Austrian author Ludwig Laher presented “Literature, History and Civic Engagement: The Novel ´Heart Flesh Degeneration’ and its Austrian Environment,” at the College of Saint Benedict on Tuesday, April 30th, 2013. The presentation covered his research on a Work Education Camp set up by the Nazi’s near Salzburg Austria, in 1940. […]
Scott Russell Sanders Apr. 17, 2012 On April 17, 2012 students and faculty from many departments welcomed Scott Russell Sanders back to campus. […]
World Voices May 4, 2011 Hervé Le Tellier, David Bezmozgis, Kyung-sook Shin and Deborah Baker were the featured award-winning authors for this book reading event. Card Making Event Mary Bruno, owner of Bruno Press, taught 20 students how to make their own cards using a letterpress. […]
Papermaking Class July 1, 2010 Participants met at the Prairie Kiosk to get a brief description of the plants used to make this signature paper. They then moved to the New Science Center to see the rest of the process and make their own paper. […]
Language for a New Century April 16, 2009 Featuring Ravi Shankar and Tina Chang. Shankar and Chang read from their anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Jorie Graham March 12, 2009 Jorie Graham gave a public reading with a book signing and social to follow. […]
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty novels and books of poetry and prose. She has won awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice. […]
Anne Carson April 20, 2007 “A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets” Carson’s lecture consisted of a reading of 15 sonnets to the accompaniment of a video featuring three Merce Cunningham dancers, and a soundtrack of various sounds and some live action. Donald Hall April 24, 2007 U.S. […]
SpeakOut on Hurricane Katrina Feb. 2, 2006 Featuring Tony Cunningham, Matt Lindstrom, Derek Larson, and Ozzie Mayers A lively conversation exploring the implications of this tragedy locally and nationally. This event was co-sponsored by Project LOGOS and the Philosophy Department. Robert Hass Feb. 15, 2006 Robert Hass is a poet, critic, environmentalist and former U.S. […]
Anouar Benmalek April 13, 2005 Benmalek read from his novel Les Amants Desunis (The Lovers of Algeria). This event was co-sponsored with Project LOGOS, with support from the Warner Foundation and the Van Evera Foundation. Benmalek was in residence at the college April 11-15, 2005. […]
