Marlena Williams (October 7) Marlena Williams is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She is also an LC alumna, double-majoring in English and History (BA ’14). She is the author of the essay collection Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist (The Ohio State Press, 2023). You can find her other work in the Yale Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Literary Hub, Sentient Media, and elsewhere. This event is co-sponsored by LC Gender Studies.
Aamina Ahmad (October 29) is a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Awar. Her first novel, The Return of Faraz Ali, was named a notable NYT and NPR pick for 2022 and went on to win the Art Siedenbaum L.A. Times First Book prize, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain First Book prize, and the Gordon Bowker Volcano prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she has a story collection forthcoming which will be published by Riverhead in 2026. She is also the author of a play, The Dishonored. She teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
Rebecca Clarren (February 5) has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Salon.com. Her latest work, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance (Viking/Penguin, 2023), was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Books, The Forward, The Christian Science Monitor and The Tribal College Journal. A blend of history, journalism and memoir, The Cost of Free Land investigates how 20th-century federal policies that gave her ancestors - Jews fleeing oppression in Russia - free land on the South Dakota prairie and a pathway to the middle class, came at great cost to their Lakota neighbors. The book not only retells this entangled history but grapples with what can be done to reconcile the past. This event is co-sponsored by LC History.
Catherine Barnett (February 18) is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
Consuelo Wise (April 1) is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University in Oregon. She is also an LC alumna and English major (BA ’09). Consuelo’s forthcoming book, b o y (Omnidawn Publishing, 2024), is a hybrid of lyric poetry and essay in which, through repetition, fragmentation, and syntax, the protagonist envisions ways to process great loss.
