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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.