The Visiting Writers Series began in the Spring of 2014 with a reading by poet Roger Reeves. After the start of the MFA in Creative Writing in the Fall of that year, the VWS took off. Over the past 8 years, the MFA in Creative Writing has hosted nationally renowned poets and writers, adding to the vibrant literary culture of Lexington. All events are free and open to the public.

The Visiting Writers Series began in the Spring of 2014 with a reading by poet Roger Reeves. After the start of the MFA in Creative Writing in the Fall of that year, the VWS took off. Over the past 8 years, the MFA in Creative Writing has hosted nationally renowned poets and writers, adding to the vibrant literary culture of Lexington. All events are free and open to the public.

The Visiting Writers Series began in the Spring of 2014 with a reading by poet Roger Reeves. After the start of the MFA in Creative Writing in the Fall of that year, the VWS took off. Over the past 8 years, the MFA in Creative Writing has hosted nationally renowned poets and writers, adding to the vibrant literary culture of Lexington. All events are free and open to the public.

The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning has chosen Ed McClanahan, 86, and Gurney Norman, 81, both of Lexington, as this year's living inductees into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. They will be honored February 13th at 7PM at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 East Main Street. The event is free and open to the public. To read more about this event please click HERE!

Dr. Ashley Sorrell of CELT and The Graduate School is heading this workshop. 

Identifying and Communicating Transferable Skills

In this interactive workshop, we will identify specific skills you have developed in your academic career and discuss how to best articulate these for careers within and beyond the academy. Participants will begin the process of looking at their academic experiences holistically by reflecting on how their graduate education prepared them for a diversity of career paths.

This talk will use a hybrid, multi-disciplinary lens to explore how Black women’s art intersects with and influences popular media through mainstream visual representation, as well as its relationship to political discourses on race, gender and embodied experience. Drawing on Black feminism, Literacy Studies and Critical Theory, I focus on the work of Kara Walker and Julie Dash as situated within the contested and politically charged narratives that animate the ways in which we understand current trends and cultural productions ranging from Beyonce’s Lemonade to #BlackGirlMagic to post-Katrina New Orleans. By theorizing these artifacts and relationships, the talk also grapples with contextualizing these works as part of a continuum wherein Black women’s experiences (through artistic production) reflect and constitute a complex network of literacies engaging with race, class, gender, sexuality and revolution. Lastly, the talk aims to mobilize these subjects for classroom practice that responds to the growing need for instructional and curricular innovations that not only include but center Black women's art and feminist theory as potential catalysts for social change.

Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by Sociology, English, Social Theory, African American & Africana Studies

English Graduate Students! Stop by the fishbowl for coffee, bagels, and comaraderie!