Workshop Assistant Professor of Poetry, Margaret Ross, and Visiting Fiction faculty members, Evan James and Claire Lombardo will read in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of Dey House/ Glenn Schaeffer Library at 7 p.m.
Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare. Her poems and translations have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, and POETRY, and have been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright arts grant, and residencies from Yaddo.
Evan James is the author of I’ve Been Wrong Before: Essays and Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel.
Evan is an award-winning writer whose personal essays and fiction have appeared in such publications as Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times, among others. He received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Carson McCullers Center, The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, The University of Iowa, and the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat, where he was a 2017 Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow.
His essay “A Role I Was Born to Play” was selected and read by Tan France of Netflix’s Queer Eye for The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast. Listen and read here.
As an editor-at-large for The Iowa Review, he put together a special portfolio of surrealistic art and writing, “Americana Fantastica,” for the Winter 2019/20 issue.
He has taught at The University of Iowa, The Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and Victoria University of Wellington. He also taught for four years at Pierrepont School in Westport, CT, where he established and developed the school’s creative writing program. Born in Seattle, he now lives in New York and teaches in the First-Year Writing program at The New School.
Claire Lombardo's debut novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was an instant New York Times bestseller and has been translated or is forthcoming in over a dozen languages. Her second novel, Same As It Ever Was, was published in 2024 by Doubleday Books.
Claire is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in, among others, Playboy, Barrelhouse Magazine, Little Fiction, and Longform. Her story, "I Only Want to Talk About the Nice Things," was one of 2016's Best of the Net, and was #1 on Longform's 2015 fiction list.
Prior to publishing The Most Fun We Ever Had, Claire spent several years working with homeless children and families in Chicago. She has also been a dog walker, a nanny, a temp, and a communications aide at a woodwind nonprofit. She is not herself a woodwind musician.
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