V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan

Reading:

Sept. 4, 6 p.m., Bingham Poetry Room

Axton Master Class:
Generative Writing Session: Sept. 5, 10 a.m. to noon, HUM300

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post) Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.

A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Hannah Pittard

Reading:
Oct. 16, 6 p.m., The Writing Center in the Ekstrom Library

Axton Master Class (Fiction):
Fiction Workshop: Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to noon, HUM300

Hannah Pittard is the Guy M. Davenport Professor in English at the University of Kentucky, a MacDowell and Ragdale fellow, and a winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. She is the author of six books, including the novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Reading:
Nov. 6, 6 p.m., Virtual

Axton Master Class (Poetry):
Poetry Workshop: Nov. 7, 10 a.m.to noon, Virtual

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of three books of poetry, including Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best poetry collections of the year by Electric Literature and Lit Hub.

His previous books are Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019), winner of the CSU Open Book Prize, and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His chapbook The Gospel According to X was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019 as part of the Rane Arroyo Series.

His work has been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, BOMB, The Cincinnati Review, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Orion, and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His poems and essays have been translated into Russian and Spanish, and his work in hybrid forms includes poetry comics and a self-published zine on gender-affirming surgery.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. In 2020, he was awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award by the Publishing Triangle. He has taught poetry and creative writing at institutions including Kalamazoo College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Born in Iowa in 1987, he holds degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.