Spring ’26 Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival -
Highlights of Past Festivals from ’21 - ’25
& Spring 2026 MIU MFA Residency Videos

Below you can find the videos of our Spring ‘26 Literary Festival for use of students enrolled in MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing! Enjoy.

An important note on the ethics of the use of our program's Vimeo library

You are all free to use our Vimeo library as our students. However, please DO NOT share these links with friends, online on social media, in classes you may teach or attend elsewhere, or in other places. This material is for your private educational use ONLY as students of our MFA program. It's not for distribution of any kind.

Many of our guest speakers and faculty expressly have not given permission to have their materials shared beyond their live sessions and beyond the MFA classroom supervised by our MFA faculty within the residency course. Quite a few of our writers have asked for contracts or have expressed clearly via email that they don't want their material shared beyond the classroom to guarantee this privacy. Writers visiting us may share or read new work, which they don't want to have end up in unforeseen places, which might count as "publication" without their knowledge. Our literary guests have been paid one-time speaker fees; not fees that allow us to publicly share their work long-term. Our students and event visitors, including all of you, may also not want to have your words and questions or shares be distributed beyond the classroom as you read out loud your vulnerable freewrites and prompts in the workshop sessions.

In short: All distribution of any material from this course has to go through me to guarantee the privacy and rights of our visiting authors and also of you, as our students, as you share in the classroom. If you have any question, please talk to me. I know the back stories on each guest and am managing this situation ethically toward our guests in a manner that benefits all of you as our students at all times.

Thank you so much for your conscientiousness! Feel free to contact me at 641-451-4854 or npassi@miu.edu or at soulboneliterary@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Nynke

Week One: February 9 - February 15, 2026

Monday, February 9, 2026

Day time onboarding and introduction events in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

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

Tonight we’ll open our MIU MFA Showcase with a reading with some of our core MFA faculty: Jennifer Espinoza, Emilie 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

Day time onboarding and introduction events in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

MASTER CLASS and READING - REPLAY LIVE
On Creative Process
with Lia Purpura
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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/

The handout with the journal information is uploaded into your module. Below you can find the Q&A session after we watched the video above.

Wed. February 11

PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
Science Writing
with Jennie Rothenberg Gritz and Benji Jones
Time: 10:00 AM - 12 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

In this session, one of our MFA creative nonfiction mentors, Jennie Rothenberg Grtiz, Senior Editor at Smithsonian Magazine, is pairing up with journalist Benji Jones to talk about science writing. Both Jennie and Benji grew up in our Fairfield, IA, community. We are so glad to have them back! Replay from Fall 2022 Festival.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz earned her MA in Journalism at UC Berkeley. She was a senior editor at The Atlantic before becoming senior editor at Smithsonian Magazine, where she edits features about science, history, and culture. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Lonely Planet travel series. She is an alumna of our English department, earning her undergraduate degree in Literature at MIU as well as a repeat mentor in our MFA.

Benji Jones is an environmental reporter at Vox based in Brooklyn, NY. He previously covered the energy industry as a senior reporter at Business Insider. His writing also appears in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Audubon Magazine. Benji has an MS in ecology and evolution from Stanford University. He grew up in our community in Fairfield.

MASTER CLASS - LIVE EVENT
Inside Out: Balancing the Internal through the External in Writing
with Clint Martin
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Location: The Library

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
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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: The Library

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.

Handouts and documents also uploaded in your daily module.

won’t you celebrate with me
by lucille clifton

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Afternoon onboarding and introduction events in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

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
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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

WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
Writing for Children
with Anika Fajardo
Time: 10 AM - 12 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

Anika Fajardo will talk and answer questions about writing for children, sharing her own writing journey. Replay from Fall 2022 Festival.

Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. She is the author of a book about that experience, Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Book (Nonfiction) of 2020 from City Pages and was a finalist for the 2020 Minnesota Book Award. Her debut middle-grade novel What If a Fish (Simon & Schuster, 2020) was awarded the 2021 Minnesota Book Award. Her next book for young readers, Meet Me Halfway (Simon & Schuster) will be published in spring 2022. Her writing for adults and children has appeared in numerous publications including Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton), We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (U of Minnesota Press), and Sky Blue Waters: Great Stories for Young Readers (U of Minnesota Press). She also wrote Encanto: A Tale of Three Sisters, the middle-grade tie-in novel for the Disney film Encanto. She has earned awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. A writer, editor, and teacher, she lives with her family in the very literary city of Minneapolis.

Session A: GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
The New American Mythos: Writing Speculative Stories in America from the Margins
with Alice Paige
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

The American Mythic shifts beneath a cacophony of new voices; the old language of the sacrifice, the sword, and the beast are repurposed and reinvented for modern conversations. Join in a 120-minute workshop to discuss the methods in which language, tropes, and story structures are reimagined to illuminate voices pushed to the margins of past American narratives. This workshop will be part-lecture and discussion and part-generative. Replay from Fall 2024 Festival.

Alice Paige is a transgender author, educator, and activist from Chicago, Illinois. She teaches creative writing at Hamline University, Saint Paul Conservatory for the Performing Artist, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She writes about the healing power of community, the dangers of assimilation, and the ghosts of what we once were. Her work can be found in American Precariat, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Luna Station Quarterly, The Rumpus and plenty of other strange places.

Session B: PRESENTATION - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
First Steps Across the Language Border: Finding the Courage to Become a Literary Translator
with Francesca Bell and Suphil Lee Park
Time: 1:30 - 3:30 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

Poet Francesca Bell will join us again to speak about translation and how to take first steps across the language borders. How can you find courage to become a literary translator? Do you need to be a native speaker to the languages you translate into and from? How do translators work? From the Spring ‘23 festival. Poet Francesca Bell could unfortunately not join us this time.

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound (Red Hen Press, 2023). She has co-translated from Arabic and translates from German. Her translation Whoever Drowned Here, a selection of poems by Max Sessner, will be published August 22, 2023. Her poems and translations appear widely, in magazines such as NELLE, New England Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and Rattle. She is translation editor of Los Angeles Review and lives with her family in Novato, California.

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is a bilingual writer, poet, and translator who was born and grew up in South Korea before finding home in the States. She's the author of the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex, winner of the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life, selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press). She also won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize for her short fiction and received a fiction prize from Writer's Digest for her flash fiction. She graduated from New York University with a BA in English and from the University of Texas at Austin with an MFA in Poetry. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and Poetry, among many others.

Late afternoon craft analysis onboarding session is included in your Canvas course shell in the module for this day, Friday, Feb. 13.

READING - REPLAY LIVE
Spring in Siberia, Red Hen Press
with Artem Mozgovoy
Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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.

Artem Mozgovoy is a writer, poet, and journalist from Russia who currently resides in Europe. Born and raised in a small town in Central Siberia at the time when the Soviet Union was falling apart, he began his career as a cadet journalist in a local newspaper when he was sixteen; at twenty-six he was an editor-in-chief. In 2012, as Russia began legalizing its persecution of gay people, he left his homeland. Having lived in six different countries – including Israel and the United States – and worked as a movie extra, a yoga instructor, a busboy, and a magician’s assistant, today he holds a Luxembourgish passport, writes poetry and fiction in Russian and English, and lives in Brussels, Belgium. His novel "Spring in Siberia" is available wherever books are sold. His diaries "Living No Lie" are available here.

Week Two: February 16 - 22, 2026

Monday, February 16

WORKSHOP - LIVE EVENT
Walking on Water: Developing the Extended Metaphor
with Clint Martin
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Location: The Library

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.

Session A: MASTER CLASS and WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
Writing with the Weight of the Afterlives
with Ezekiel Joubert III
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

As writers, we are asked to engage, conjure, and reckon with the afterlives of our social histories using personal and speculative methods. Often in the form of ghosts, and sometimes monsters or cyborgs, our identities, positionalities, and localities offer us ways to express the perpetual destruction of our ecologies, erasure of our memories, and resistance to social forces. With a desire to heal from and imagine otherwise, we write with the weight of our afterlives. Event from Fall ‘22 Festival, replay. Please note that there is a Session B for this afternoon as well to pack more of our wonderful past sessions into this residency. Please see below.

Ezekiel Joubert III is an educator, community-engaged scholar, and creative writer. He is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations in the Division of Advanced and Applied Studies at California State University-Los Angeles. His research and writing focus on the intersections of racial capitalism and Black education, the political economy of student movement, the history of educational inequality in Black rural communities near Metro Detroit and in the Midwest, and Black organic educational intellectual thought and activism. Additionally, his work centers narratives of Black social life, the speculative and spiritual, and the poetics of teachings and learning with marginalized communities.

Session B: MASTER CLASS and WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
The Grass Dancer
with novelist Mona Power
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

In this session, author Mona Power will be reading from her first novel, The Grass Dancer, winner of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for First Fiction. Inspired by the lore of her Native American heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power—an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe—weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war. Set on a North Dakota reservation, The Grass Dancer reveals the harsh price of unfulfilled longings and the healing power of mystery and hope. Rich with drama and infused with the magic of the everyday, it takes readers on a journey through both past and present—in a tale as resonant and haunting as an ancestor's memory, and as promising as a child's dream. From the Spring 2024 Festival. Please note that there is a Session A for this afternoon as well to pack more of our wonderful past sessions into this residency. Please see above.

Mona Susan Power is the author of three books: The Grass Dancer (a novel), Roofwalker (a story collection), Sacred Wilderness (a novel), and A Council of Dolls (a novel). The Grass Dancer was awarded a PEN/Hemingway prize in 1995 and Roofwalker a Milkweed National Fiction Prize in 2002. Her new novel, A Council of Dolls, is a finalist in the 2024 Minnesota Book Awards. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Granta. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, Loft McKnight Fellowship for 2015-16, and Native Arts and Cultures Fellowship for 2016-17. She is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

FEATURED READING - REPLAY LIVE
RED HEN PRESS AUTHORS
with Francesca Bell, Kate Gayle, and Tiffany Midge
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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

NARRATIVE MASTER CLASS - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
Eight Aspects of Writing Character
with novelist Eugenia Kim
Time: 10 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

Character. It is the touchstone of literature, be it fiction, creative nonfiction, and sometimes poetry. Literature is character-driven because it is through character that we follow the story, from protagonist (the narrator in creative nonfiction), antagonist, to secondary and walk-on characters, and it is through character that the story grows to universality. How does one effectively write a memorable character? Eugenia Kim will present eight aspects of writing character, from point of view, to character’s desire, to dialogue, to image and physicality, and more. Short exercises will reinforce key elements of writing character, and extended exercises will be provided in handouts to try out on your own. From the Spring 2024 Festival.

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.

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

In this generative workshop, poet and MFA program director Nynke Passi will take you on a mystical journey writing ecstatic poetry or prose. The phrase "The Soul's Superior Instants" borrows from an Emily Dickinson poem we'll discuss.

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
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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

Morning Event Discussion and MFA Q&A from 10 AM - Noon CT in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

READING and GENERATIVE WORKSHOP with Q&A - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
with Nickole Brown
Time: 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM CT (3 hour session)
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

Nickole Brown will be reading from her work followed by a Q & A session in this intimate, creative afternoon focused on nature, climate, earth, and our human connection to our environment. Nickole Brown will offering a generative workshop following her reading. Replay from Spring 2024 Festival.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She is the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.

FEATURED FICTION READING - REPLAY LIVE
with novelists Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Eugenia Kim
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

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: The Library

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. We will draw on Sappho’s work via the Sapphomanteion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bibliomancy (etymologically from βιβλίον biblion- 'book' and μαντεία -manteía 'divination, so divination by means of' books. Can be sacred texts (Bible, Quran, Torah, Upanishads, Vedic texts, etc), I Ching, texts of great authors of the past (Homer, Rumi, Hafiz, Sappho, Virgil, etc), or any other kind of text or source you can open to a random page to receive a “message” in response to a question or as a guidance for your day.

Session B: PRESENTATION - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
How to Create a Small Press Out of Thin Air
with Diane Frank from Blue LIght Press
Time: 10 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

In this informative presentation, co-founder of Blue Light Press and author Diane Frank will lift the curtains and explain how to start a small press out of thin air. She will draw on decades of experience with Blue Light Press. She will also be available for Q & A at the end of the session. This is a session from the Spring ‘24 festival with frequent guest and former MIU faculty, Diane Frank. Blue Light press is publishing the first book of our MFA graduate, Aliyah Warwick, her MFA thesis, the poetry collection A Labor of Love.

Diane Frank is author of eight books of poems, two novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She is editor of Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, which was featured on KQED. Diane plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Blue Light Press is a collective of poets and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area who produce artistically designed books. Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry, fiction, and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight.

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

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
Synchronous Streaming Location: The Library (can also be watched asynchronously on your Vimeo page here)

"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

Session A: READING, MASTER CLASS, and GENERATIVE WORKSHOP - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
Microfiction & Micrononfiction (Flash Narrative)
with Maureen Aitken
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

In this combination of reading, master class, and generative workshop, author Maureen Aitken will talk about microfiction and micrononfiction, plus the differences between. By reading her own work and the work of others, and by giving prompts, she will inspire you to write your own. From the Spring ‘23 Festival.

Maureen Aitken’s collection of short stories, The Patron Saint of Lost Girls, is a Nilsen Prize Winner and received a Kirkus Star and a Foreword Review Star. Her writing also won the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Artist Initiative Grant, the Loft Mentor Award, an award in Ireland’s Fish Short Story Prize, and a grant from the SASE/Jerome Foundation. She was a 2019 Minnesota Book Award Finalist in the Novel and Short Story Category. Her stories have been widely published and have received three Pushcart Prizes nominations. She teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, where she received her MFA degree.

Session B: POETRY READING - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
with Susan Rich and Mary Peelen
Time: 10:00 AM - 12 noon CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

For this session, we are joined by two poets who are sisters-in-law. Mary Peelen is Zooming in from Paris where she lives, and Susan joins us from the Pacific coast. We are so excited for this reading by these two wonderful poets. Mary’s book has already been a book pick by Usha, our literary MFA cat.

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.

Mary Peelen, M.Div., MFA, is a poet and writer who lives in San Francisco and Paris. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, New Critique, Poetry Review (UK), and other journals. Her poetry collection, Quantum Heresies, won the 2019 Kithara Book Prize and was published by Glass Lyre Press.

Praise for their Work
”The new and selected poems of Gallery of Postcards and Maps [by Susan Rich] introduce themselves with a warmth that deepens into wisdom. Susan Rich finds music in everything inside and outside her windows: Leonora Carrington, Vegetarian Vampires, lovers and ex-lovers, Lorca and Courbet. This book displays the hallmarks of her oeuvre: her mastery of form; her acuity of heart and eye. These terrific poems are full of compassion, lyricism and attention. The selected reflects an ever-present restlessness of spirit, flesh, and intellect.” —Terrance Hayes

”Mary Peelen’s spare poems pulse with what they contain and describe—in both the imagistic and the mathematical sense of the word—harnessing the power of the sciences to navigate the chthonic worlds of illness, loss, and desire on both personal and planetary scales. Peelen denies the divisions of mind and body, art and science, precision and ardor. Her poems resonate with allusion (Lady Lazarus’s hair as a supernova) and sound (copernicium, ununoctium). Peelen unveils new ways to make sense of our complicated, contradictory world.” — Elizabeth Bradfeld, naturalist and author of Once Removed

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: The Library

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.

OPEN MIC READING - LIVE EVENT
with All of Our MFA Students and Alumni
For Students and Alumni of MIU’s MFA program only
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
Location: The Library

Tonight we’ll have an open mic reading with just our own MFA community: faculty, students, and alumni. This reading is not open to the public. We welcome MFA students, alumni, and faculty only. All students can bring 1 - 2 pages of work to share!

Saturday, February 21

MASTER CLASS and READING - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
The Art of Fiction Writing
with Mark Spragg
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Location: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

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 - ASYNCHRONOUS EVENT
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: Your Vimeo Page here (asynchronous viewing only)

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.

Sunday, Feb. 22

Bonus Event: ANTHOLOGY READING - ASYNCHRONOUS SESSION
We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World
(edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura)
Introduced by Carolyn Holbrook, with Anika Fajardo, Ezekiel Joubert III, Mary Moore Easter, and Mona Susan Power

Because so many of you, during our open mic, talked about Minneapolis, here a bonus event reading from the Spring ‘22 festival. We had two different anthology readings from We Are Meant to Rise, both hosted by Carolyn Holbrook but with different readers each time. This was the first one.

We are honored to present you a replay of a reading of the anthology We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura. Our readers tonight are Anika Fajardo, Ezekiel Joubert III, Mary Moore Easter, and Mona Susan Power. Carolyn Holbrook will introduce.

The anthology We Are Meant to Rise is a brilliant and rich gathering of diverse Minnesota voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond. In this book, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in U.S. history. Essays and poems vividly reflect the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of worldwide demands for justice.

"A powerful and passionate take on a fraught moment." —Publishers Weekly

Mentor Readings

Emilie Lygren - Poetry Mentor Spring ‘26

Our mentor Emilie Lygren is reading during the festival on the evening of Feb. 9 at 7:30 PM CT. The recording will be posted above at the top of this page (under Monday Feb. 9 events) after the event is held.

Susan Daniels - Fiction Mentor Spring ‘26

Spring ‘22 reading with Susan Daniels and Karen Osborn.

Linda Egenes - Creative Nonfiction Mentor Spring ‘26

Spring ‘22 mentor reading with Jennifer Espinoza (poetry), Susan Daniels (fiction), Jennie Rothenberg Gritz (creative nonfiction, and Linda Egenes (multi-genre)

Spring ’26 Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival - Highlights of Past Festivals from ’21 - ’25& Spring 2026 MIU MFA Residency Videos