Vinnie Wilhelm

Axton Reading:
February 29 5:00 pm
Bingham Humanities Room 100

Vinnie Wilhelm is a screenwriter and fiction writer whose credits include The Right Stuff (Nat Geo), Penny Dreadful (Showtime), The Terror (AMC), and Castle Rock (Hulu), for which he won a Writers Guild of America award. He is also the author of the short story collection In the Absence of Predators (2011). He lives in Los Angeles.

Jeff Worley

Axton Reading:
March 19 7:30 pm
Bingham Poetry Room (Ekstrom Library)

Axton Master Class (poetry):
March 20, 10 am to noon
Bingham Humanities (HUM) 300

Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2019-2020, is the author of six books of poetry and an anthology titled What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets. His book, The Only Time There Is (1995), won the Mid-List Press first-book competition. Happy Hour at the Two Keys Tavern was named 2006 Kentucky Book of the Year in Poetry and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Worley’s most recent book, The Poet Laureate of Aurora Avenue, was also nominated for a Pulitzer. He has received numerous other awards, including Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. More recently, Jeff was the winner of the Judy Gaines Young Award from Transylvania University in 2022. He divides his time between Lexington and a cabin at Cave Run Lake.  

Kiki Petrosino

Axton Reading:
April 4 5:00 pm
Chao Auditorium (Ekstrom Library)

Axton Master Class (poetry):
April 5, 10 am to noon
Bingham Humanities (HUM) 300

Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.