The Grand Valley Writers Series has a long history of bringing distinguished and emerging writers to campus to read from their work, visit classes, and interact with students across GVSU's campus. In past years, the Grand Valley Writers Series has been proud to host a dynamic and diverse range of writers on campus including Traci Brimhall, Jericho Brown, Peter Ho Davies, Tarfia Faizullah, Jamaal May, Roxane Gay, Claire Vaye Watkins, Derek Palacio, Maggie Smith, Amina Gautier, Dinty W. Moore, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Vievee Francis, Matthew Olzmann, and many others. 

Michael Nye

Fiction Writer & Editor
Thursday, October 10, 2024

1:00-2:15pm, Craft Talk, Kirkhof 2266
2:30-3:45pm, Fiction Reading, Kirkhof 2266

Michael Nye is the author of a novel and two short story collections: All the Castles Burned, Strategies Against Extinction, and Until we Have Faces. Nye’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines such as Kenyon Review, North American Review, The Millions, Literary Hub, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, Normal School,  among many others. For almost twenty years, he has taught creative writing and publishing courses for both graduate and undergraduate students at places such as the University of Missouri, Washington University, Kenyon College, and Denison University. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio and is the editor of Story.

Andrew Collard & Vince Granata

Writing Department Faculty Reading
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Poetry & Nonfiction Reading: 5:00 - 6:30 p.m., Chamberlain Room, 1st Floor, Honors

Andrew Collard: Set in the metropolis centered on Detroit, MI, Andrew’s first book, Sprawl, won the Hollis Summers poetry prize and was published in March of 2023 by Ohio University Press. Poems from Sprawl have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Best New Poets, and many more journals and magazines. Andrew received a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University and currently teaches as a Visiting Professor at Grand Valley State University. Over the years, he has served as a poetry editor for Witness and Third Coast Magazine, and as an associate editor for New Issues Press. He lives with his son in Grand Rapids, MI.

Vince Granata is a writer from New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of the memoir, Everything Is Fine, which was published by Atria Books in 2021. His writing has recently appeared in Rolling Stone, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, and LitHub, and has been recognized in Best American Essays 2018 and Best American Essays 2020. He is currently a visiting professor of writing at Grand Valley State University.

Katy Didden & Joanna Eleftheriou

Poetry Craft Talk with Katy Didden
Monday, February 24, 2025, 3:00 - 4:15pm, Kirkhof 2266

Poetry & Nonfiction Reading with Katy Didden & Joanna Eleftheriou
Monday, February 24, 2025, 6:00 - 7:30pm
Multipurpose Room, Mary Idema Pew Library

Nonfiction Craft Talk with Joanna Eleftheriou
Tuesday, February 25, 2025, 1:00 - 2:15pm, Kirkhof 2266

Katy Didden’s first book,The Glacier’s Wake, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleiades Press, and was published in 2013. Her new book of mixed-media erasure poems, “Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland” (a collaboration with illustrator Kevin Tseng), was published by Tupelo Press in 2022. She has published work in journals such as Ecotone, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Image, Poetry, 32 Poems, and The Kenyon Review, and her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Katy was a 2013-2014 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.  In 2018, she participated in Banff Research in Culture’s Beyond Anthropocene residency, where she collaborated with a group of scholars, scientists, and artists to create the Almanac for the Beyond (Tropic Editions, 2019). She is currently an Associate Professor at Ball State University. 

Joanna Eleftheriou is an associate professor of English at Christopher Newport University, a contributing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Her essays, short stories, poems, and translations appear regularly in journals including Bellingham Review, CutBank, Arts and Letters, and The Common. She currently serves as Book Review editor for The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and chair of the Membership Committee at the Modern Greek Studies Association. Joanna's first book, the essay collection This Way Back, came out in 2020 from West Virginia University Press.

Be sure to check out past seasons of the Grand Valley Writers Series. Any questions about the series should be referred to Grand Valley Writers Series Coordinator and Associate Professor Beth Peterson ([email protected]).