Contemporary Writers Series 2023-24

Season 27 of the Contemporary Writers Series will feature Working Class Voices in U.S. Literature

Always engaging, inspiring, and thought-provoking, the Contemporary Writers Series is a curated look at the literature in our lives. Join us for this fresh series of author talks on the Aquinas College campus.


Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy
Thursday, March 21, 2024

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Camille Dungy will perform on March 21, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. in the Kretschmer Recital Hall in the Art & Music Center on the campus of Aquinas College. This event is free and open to the public.

 


Dustin M. HoffmanDustin M. Hoffman
Thursday, November 16, 2023

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His second collection No Good for Digging and chapbook Secrets of the Wild were published by Word West Press. He spent ten years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA from Bowling Green State University and his PhD from Western Michigan University. More than ninety of his stories have appeared in magazines, including Black Warrior Review, Saturday Evening Post, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, and One Story. He is a professor of English at Winthrop University in South Carolina. You can visit his site here: dustinmhoffman.com 

Dustin M. Hoffman will perform on November 16, 2023, at 6:00 p.m. in the Kretschmer Recital Hall in the Art & Music Center on the campus of Aquinas College. This event is free and open to the public.

 


Matt de la Peña

Matt de la Peña
Thursday, September 28, 2023

Matt de la Peña is the New York Times Bestselling, Newbery Medal-winning author of seven young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, and Superman: Dawnbreaker) and six picture books (including Milo Imagines the World and Last Stop on Market Street). In 2016 he was awarded the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award. Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific where he attended school on a full basketball scholarship. In 2019 Matt was given an honorary doctorate from UOP. de la Peña currently lives in Southern California. He teaches creative writing and visits schools and colleges throughout the country.

Matt de la Peña will perform on September 28, 2023, at 6:00 p.m. in the Kretschmer Recital Hall in the Art & Music Center on the campus of Aquinas College. The event is free and open to the public.