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Jenny Offill
Thursday 9/26 @7PM
Muskie Archives 201

Jenny Offill is the critically-acclaimed author of three books of fiction, including Dept. of Speculation (Granta Books 2014), a New York Times Top 10 Best Books of 2014. Her most recent book, Weather: A Novel (Knopf 2020), was lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Offill was the subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo. Offill has taught widely in MFA programs, and currently is the visiting writer at Bard College.

Heidi Julavits
Wednesday 10/30 @7pm
Muskie Archives 201

Heidi Julavits was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York in 2003, where she’s lived ever since. Initially a novelist, who wrote a total of four novels, the best of which is probably THE VANISHERS, she’s since switched to nonfiction, and has published two memoirs—THE FOLDED CLOCK and DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF—as well as essays in magazines about topics such as avalanches, volcanoes, land art, and small town politics. She’s currently working on a book about a dead French actress’s estate she found on eBay, an art world scam artist, a “non-natural hill” in Berlin, and end-of-life care. She is a founding co-editor of THE BELIEVER magazine, co-editor of the book WOMEN IN CLOTHES, and a professor at Columbia University.

Ru Freeman ’93
Thursday 11/14 @4:30PM
Pettengill G52

Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short-story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the widely translated novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book. She is the editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015) and co-editor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2018). She writes for the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a winner of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing in the US and abroad.

Daniel Borzutzky
Thursday 03/14 @7PM
Pettengill G21

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.