SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL
and MIU MFA Residency Showcase
Feb. 9 - 22, Spring 2026

Our online Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival pairs writing and craft with creative process, consciousness, discussion of the more ineffable aspects of the creative life such as the role of intuition in writing, and the intersection of writing with personal transformation and healing. It promotes the kind of writing and creative work that comes from duende, the unspeakable energies that arise from the soles of our feet and run through our spines; that make us feel physically as if the tops of our heads were taken off when we read or write (Emily Dickinson); that connect heart and mind and senses or marry body and spirit; that culture empathy; that reconnect us to earth and nature and each other; that spark the mystical soul and give life to our writing; and that include death and shadow.

The festival is co-sponsored by the MIU MFA in Creative Writing’s residencies and the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center. Below we list our public events that are included in our Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival. You can register for our Fall 2025 Festival via our Eventbrite page, which will be linked in here and below shortly. Events are free, online, and open to the public, but donations are encouraged via our Eventbrite page. We will use any donations to help sponsor future festivals so we can pay our writers as well as possible and continue offering our events free of charge. You can contact us at soulboneliterary@gmail.com. You can also contact us at npassi@miu.edu.

Spring 2026 Festival - MIU MFA Showcase Event List

Welcome to our Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival for Spring ‘26, which is an MIU MFA Showcase. Please join us for this co-collaboration between Soul Bone℠ and the MIU MFA in Creative Writing, both founded and directed by Nynke Passi. Our festivals are free, online, and open to the public. Donations are very much appreciated and warmly welcomed, plus becoming increasingly necessary for the sustenance of the festival due to academic defunding. The event registration pages in Eventbrite include a donation option. The series below is a limited series with limited events; by April, we will make the full collection available as a fundraiser to pay for the events of Fall ‘26. We will also extend this festival in a reading series that will run from end of February through June ‘26. We will use all donations to pay our writers and sponsor and make possible more free events in the future. We hope to see you soon!

FREE ZOOM REGISTRATION VIA EVENTBRITE
Feb. 9 - 22, 2026

TIME ZONE CONVERTER if you need it. All events are in Central Time.

Public Events: February 9 - 22, 2026

Monday, February 9, 2026

• MFA Faculty READING - LIVE EVENT
  with Jennifer Espinoza, Emilie Lygren, and Nynke Passi
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Tonight we’ll open our MIU MFA Showcase with a reading with some of our core MFA faculty: Jennifer Espinoza, Emily Lygren, and Nynke Passi, the MFA program director.

Jennifer Espinoza is author of the poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019)., plus I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent publication is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self.” in Gulf Coast. She has years of experience teaching and mentoring in creative writing at the graduate level and was a full-time faculty at MIU for several years.

Emilie Lygren’s first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Emilie has developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Her new collection of poetry, Once I Was a Stone, was published last year by Wayfarer Press.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of MIU’s English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been or will be published in Tupelo Quarterly, CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

Tues. February 10

• MASTER CLASS and READING - REPLAY LIVE
  On Creative Process
  with Lia Purpura
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Join us for this reading with special guest writer Lia Purpura. The event is curated by MIU's creative process class in collaboration with MIU's MFA in Creative Writing. Please note that this is a one-hour event that will start promptly at 10:15 so our starting time is 10:10 to make sure everyone is in the Zoom room in a timely manner. Replay from Fall 2024 Festival.

Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays, All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books) has arrived! Her most recent collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin.) She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three previous collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch & Taste of Ash).

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), she has been awarded a fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), and the Maryland State Arts Council, among others; she is also the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes.

Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Emergence, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays and The Pushcart Anthology.

Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA, and reads and lectures around the country. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

Readings for Lia Purpura’s workshop:
1) https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/the-ecology-of-attention/
2) https://orionmagazine.org/article/on-coming-back-as-a-buzzard/

Wed. February 11

• MASTER CLASS - LIVE EVENT
  Balancing the Internal through the External
  with Clint Martin
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

In this lecture, MFA Facutly Clint Martin talks about balancing the internal through the external, exploring how the concrete details of the external serve to support internal thoughts and emotions drawing on examples in both prose and poetry.

Clint Martin received his MFA from Spalding University in the spring of 2020. Since then, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals and magazines such as Sycamore Review, Sheepshead Review, Binary Review, Motherwell Magazine, and The Bluebird Word. Clint has been a reader for The Louisville Review and been the faculty advisor for The Midway Muse. Currently, Clint is a full-time faculty member of MIU's English department and will also be teaching two MFA courses every school year: Writing Pedagogy and Literary Theory for the Creative Writer.

• FEATURED READING - REPLAY LIVE
  Other Kingdoms, Other Worlds
  with Kai Coggin and Nicole Callihan
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Tonight we’ll feature the poets Kai Coggin, who will be reading from her recently published book Mother of Other Kingdoms, and Nicole Callihan, who will be reading from her newest book, chigger ridge. Replay from Fall 2024 Festival.

Kai Coggin is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions 2024). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist with the Arkansas Arts Council, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, Coggin is the recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2024 INTERCHANGE Community Grant, a 2023 CATALYZE grant, a 2021 Governor’s Arts Award, and twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times. Kai lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. www.kaicoggin.com.

Nicole Callihan’s most recent book is chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023) and the 2019 novella, The Couples. She also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Winner of an Alma Award, her next book, SLIP, will be published by Saturnalia in 2025. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.

There is also an online reading offered by former student Madhav Sharma through the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, Inc.

Thurs. February 12

• GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  How to Get Home in the Dark: Writing on Mental Health and Healing
  with Emilie Lygren
  Time: 10 AM - 12 PM CT
  Location:

In this session, our mentor and faculty, plus MFA graduate, Emilie Lygren will take you on a journey on how to get home in the dark and how to write about mental health and healing. This workshop is inspired by her new anthology coming out from Blue Light Press this coming year.

Emilie Lygren’s first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Emilie has developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Her new collection of poetry, Once I Was a Stone, was published last year by Wayfarer Press.

• WORKSHOP - REPLAY LIVE
  Writing the Disturbed Essay
  with Katie Jean Shinkle, Monica Prince, Danielle Pafunda, and Lily Hoang
  Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Today we will be joined for a workshop and reading on the topic of "Writing the Disturbed Essay: Memory & Identity." Participants are Katie Jean Shinkle, Monica Prince, Danielle Pafunda, and Lily Hoang whose bios are included below. Replay from Fall 2022 Festival.

While personal essay often serves as vessel for the exploration of memory and the construction of identity, the disturbed essay stirs up the sediment, allows for memory’s paradoxes, and helps us reevaluate what we reach towards when we write. It allows us to refute dominant narratives about LGBTQIA+, PoC, and disabled lives. Those elements of the past that wake us, interfere with the coherent story of a self, and invade our privacy become the radical heart of a truer story. This phenomenal panel was first offered at AWP 2022.

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four books and seven chapbooks, most recently None of This is an Invitation (coauthored with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press at University of South Dakota, forthcoming) and Thick City (Bull City Press, forthcoming). Our Prayers After the Fire, originally published on Blue Square Press, was recently reissued by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022. Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Flaunt Magazine, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Fugue, Crazyhorse, Witness, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere.

Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). She is the managing editor of the SFWP Quarterly. Her work appears in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of nine books of prose and poetry: Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), Beshrew (Dusie Press), The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books), Manhater (Dusie Press), Iatrogenic (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press). She's published two chapbooks: Cram (Essay Press) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace).

Lily Hoang is the author of six books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Non-Fiction Award finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). Her micro-tale collection The Mute Kids is forthcoming in 2022. She teaches in the MFA in Literary Arts at UC San Diego. 

Friday, February 13

• READING - REPLAY LIVE
  Spring in Siberia, Red Hen Press
  with Artem Mozgovoy
  Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Reading with Artem Mozgovoy, author of Spring in Siberia published by Red Hen Press. You can read about Artem Mozgovoy and his work on his website here. Replay from Fall 2023 Festival.

Monday, February 16

• WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  Creating an Extended Metaphor
  with Clint Martin
  Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
  Location:

In this workshop, MFA Faculty Clint Martin explores the extended metaphor. We will develop extended metaphors as a group, then work individually on our own. This is a generative workshop.

Clint Martin received his MFA from Spalding University in the spring of 2020. Since then, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals and magazines such as Sycamore Review, Sheepshead Review, Binary Review, Motherwell Magazine, and The Bluebird Word. Clint has been a reader for The Louisville Review and been the faculty advisor for The Midway Muse. Currently, Clint is a full-time faculty member of MIU's English department and will also be teaching two MFA courses every school year: Writing Pedagogy and Literary Theory for the Creative Writer.

• FEATURED READING - REPLAY LIVE
  RED HEN PRESS AUTHORS
  with Francesca Bell, Kate Gayle, and Tiffany Midge
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

Tonight a replay from the Spring 2022 Festival with three Red Hen Press authors. This event will be live streamed in our Zoom room this evening.

Francesca Bell’s poems appear in magazines such as ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Waxwing. She is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She the author of The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014.

Poet Tiffany Midge is the author of several chapbooks and the full-length poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press, 1996); The Woman Who Married a Bear. She published a memoir, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's (Nebraska Press), and her work has been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, and more.

Tuesday, February 17

• GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  The Soul’s Superior Instants: Writing the Ecstatic
  with Nynke Passi
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

In this generative workshop, poet and MFA program director Nynke Passi will take you on a mystical journey writing ecstatic poetry or prose.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of MIU’s English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been or will be published in Tupelo Quarterly, CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

• FEATURED POETRY READING - REPLAY LIVE
  Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them
  with Ellen Bass and Danusha Lameris
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. A foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reflective pauses and personal recipes from some of the contributing poets, along with original, whimsical illustrations by Melissa Castrillon, and a ribbon bookmark complete this stunning, hardcover gift format. From the Spring 2024 Festival.

This beautiful poetry anthology offers a warm, inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal—an evocative celebration of our connection to the green world. The poets from the anthology who will be reading for you tonight are no other than Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris!

Ellen Bass’s poetry collections include Indigo, Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. With Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails, and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program. You can access her newest Living Room Craft Talk Series here.

Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of two other books: The Moons of August, winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, 2014, and Bonfire Opera (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. Laméris is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program and lives in Santa Cruz, California. www.danushalameris.com

Wednesday, February 18

• FEATURED FICTION READING - REPLAY LIVE
  with novelists Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Eugenia Kim
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

We are thrilled to have with us two of our favorite past guests, the amazing novelists Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Eugenia Kim! Replay from our Spring 2024 Festival.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly (Links to an external site.) and The New Yorker, and her writing included in over 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese; many have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her novels have been made into films and plays. Born in Kolkata, India, she now teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. A short story, "The Word Love," from her collection Arranged Marriage, was made into a bilingual short film in Bengali and English, titled Ammar Ma. All the flims have won awards.

Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. An MFA graduate of Bennington College, Eugenia has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Asia Literary Review and Raven Chronicles. She teaches at Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program. Eugenia is the daughter of Korean immigrant parents who came to America shortly after the Pacific War.  “My parents’ stories seemed to carry an urgency meant to instill a Korean identity that was seeping from us with each new American word learned, each Korean word lost.”

Thursday, February 19

• Session A: MASTER CLASS and GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  Sapphomancy: a Writing Ritual
  with Jennifer Espinoza
  Time: 10 AM - 12:00 PM CT
  Location:

In this session, author and MFA faculty Jennifer Espinoza will explore Sapphomancy, a form of divination designed as a (lesbian) oracle based on the writings of the Greek poetess Sappho of Lesbos. will draw on her work via the Sapphomanteion.

Jennifer Espinoza is author of the poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019)., plus I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent publication is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self.” in Gulf Coast. She has years of experience teaching and mentoring in creative writing at the graduate level and was a full-time faculty at MIU for several years.

• WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  The Art of the Sentence
  with Clint Martin
  Time: 1:30 - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

In this workshop, MFA Faculty Clint Martin explores the art of the sentence in a hands-on practice that continues from last year’s master class on this topic. We will practice sentence building, do small group and large group exercises, and share.

Clint Martin received his MFA from Spalding University in the spring of 2020. Since then, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals and magazines such as Sycamore Review, Sheepshead Review, Binary Review, Motherwell Magazine, and The Bluebird Word. Clint has been a reader for The Louisville Review and been the faculty advisor for The Midway Muse. Currently, Clint is a full-time faculty member of MIU's English department and will also be teaching two MFA courses every school year: Writing Pedagogy and Literary Theory for the Creative Writer.

• PANEL, READING, and Q & A - REPLAY LIVE
  Discovering my Writerly Self: Poetry & Identity
  with Daniel Summerhill, Nia McAllister, and Quintin Collins
  Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

"James Baldwin says you don't become a writer, but rather you discover you are one and then you make a choice to live that life or none at all. Poetry, like all the arts, invites us to ask who we are. There are forces and people who try to decide for us who we should  be and who we can’t be. How we explore, discover, express, define and  challenge who we are through poetry will be the focus of this  conversation and reading." The original idea for this panel came from Dodge, where Daniel Summerhill was one of the participants. Here Daniel is joined by two of his friends, Nia McAllister and Quintin Collins. Event from the Spring ‘23 festival.

Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet and scholar originally from Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. He is the author of Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press 2021), a semi-finalist for the Wheeler and Saturnalia Poetry Prizes and Mausoleum of Flowers (CavanKerry Press 2022). A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominee, he was invited by the U.S. embassy to guest lecture in South Africa in 2018 and earned fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts and The Watering Hole. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County and Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition Studies at California State University - Monterey Bay.

Nia McAllister is a Bay Area born poet, writer, environmental justice advocate working at the intersection of art, activism, and public engagement. As Senior Public Programs Manager at The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, Nia creates participatory spaces for creative expression and literary dialogue. Nia's writing and poetry have been featured on Poets of Color Podcast and published in Doek! Literary Magazine, Radicle magazine, Meridians journal, and Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in the Time of Rebellion (Nomadic Press, 2022). 

​Quintin Collins (he/him) is a writer, editor, and Solstice MFA Program assistant director. He is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2021) and Claim Tickets for Stolen People (The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books, 2022), selected by Marcus Jackson as winner of The Journal's 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Prize. Quintin's other awards and accolades include a Pushcart Prize and the 2019 Atlantis Award from the Poet's Billow, as well as Best of the Net nominations. He is also a poetry editor for Salamander.

Friday, February 20, 2026

• MASTER CLASS and GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
  Writing Consciousness: A Queer Study of Emily Dickinson
  with Jennifer Espinoza
  Time: 1:30 - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

Today a reprise of a workshop conducted in Spring 2023 by Jennifer Espinoza. In this workshop, we’ll host a combined master class and generative workshop looking at Emily Dickinson’s work through a queer lens, drawing on material from Figuring by Maria Popova and Dickinson’s own letters and poems. The session will give opportunity for writing. This is a live event.

Jennifer Espinoza is author of the poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019)., plus I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent publication is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self.” in Gulf Coast. She has years of experience teaching and mentoring in creative writing at the graduate level and was a full-time faculty at MIU for several years.

Saturday, February 21

• MASTER CLASS and READING - REPLAY coming soon
  The Art of Fiction Writing
  with Mark Spragg
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
  Location:

Mark Spragg will join us for another master class on the craft of fiction mixed with a reading of his own new work and a Q & A where you can ask him anything you want about his process and how to go about structuring a novel, bringing characters and setting to life, writing good dialogue, and more. Event from the Spring ‘23 festival.

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone; An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004; and Bone Fire, which was published in 2010. The first three were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming. Mark also has an extensive history as a screenwriter, writing the scripts for movies such as An Unfinished Life and Everything that Rises. Mark taught one creative writing course at MIU in the 1980s and has been back several times as a guest in our undergraduate creative writing classes. He was our special guest during our first residency and has continued to join us for readings and master classes ever since.

• READING, PRESENTATION and Q & A - REPLAY coming soon
  Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press)
  with Kelli Russell Agodon and Susan Rich
  Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT
  Location:

Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems by Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon. it is published by Two Sylvias Press. Event from the Spring ‘23 festival especially added for thesis students ready to put together their manuscripts!

Book creation is an art and Demystifying the Manuscript offers many perspectives on how to put together a book of poems through the essays and interviews of contemporary prizewinning poets and editors. While there isn’t a single “correct” method for creating a book of poems, Demystifying the Manuscript is filled with expert advice on all aspects of manuscript creation: ordering your poems, determining your goals, insider tips from the editors of journals and small presses, and everything in between. Demystifying the Manuscript will guide you through the process of creating your best book of poems whether you are an emerging writer or an established poet. 

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of four collections of poems, including the award-winning Dialogues with Rising Tides (Links to an external site.), which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional land of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam, and Suquamish people. She is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Susan Rich is the author of eight books including Blue Atlas (forthcoming from Red Hen Press), Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue, winner of the PEN USA Award. Along with Brian Turner and Ilya Kaminsky, she edited The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders (Poetry Foundation). She has received awards and fellowships from Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers, Artist Trust, CityArtists, and 4Culture.