The Des Moines Area Community College’s Celebration of Literary Arts will host a program at Beaverdale Books featuring several Creative Writing students beginning at 6:30 p.m., followed by Traci Brimhall and Chigozie Obioma at 7:00 p.m.

About the Authors

Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in 2017.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, and New York Times Magazine. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Gulf Coast. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She has also received the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Jane Geske Award for poetry (selected by Kwame Dawes), and a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry comic collaborations with Eryn Cruft can be found in Guernica, The Poetry Comics, and Nashville Review. She is also a co-author of two collaborative chapbooks with Brynn Saito: Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013) and Wild Recovery (Tupelo Press, 2020). She received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and the Karnes Fellowship from Purdue Libraries to research Amelia Earhart’s unpublished poems. She currently teaches at Kansas State University and was recently selected as the Poet Laureate of Kansas.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize, making him one of only two novelists to be shortlisted for all their works. They have won about a dozen prizes including the FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, an LA Times Book prize, Internationaler Literaturpris, an NAACP Image Award, and have been nominated for many others. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. His work has been published in The Guardian, VQR, Paris Review, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and divides his time between the US and Nigeria.