Our department brings in nationally- and regionally-known writers through our annual Writers Series. Since its inception more than ten years ago (originally called the Writer's Festival), we have had readings and workshops by writers such as Lauren Winner, Silas House, Rachel Held Evans, Herbert Woodward Martin, Janet Peery, Brian Silberman, and Chris Hansen (a Lee alumnus). In that time, we have had more than fifty authors give readings, work with students individually and in classes, and meet with various groups on and off-campus. We have brought a mixture of well-known, award-winning writers and emerging authors to show our students the various ways writers make careers out of their passions.

Information for 2019-2020 Writers Series:

Angela Narciso Torres

October 14, 2020

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of “Blood Orange,” winner of the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, and the chapbook, “To the Bone.” Her second full-length collection, “What Happens Is Neither,” is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Torres has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received First Prize in the Yeats Poetry Prize and New City Magazine named her one of Chicago's Lit 50. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry.

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

February 24, 2021

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle is the author of “Even As We Breathe,” and “Going to Water.” She received The Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symp osium in 2012 and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2014. Clapsaddle currently teaches English and Cherokee Studies at Swain County High School and serves on the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network. She has also served as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation and is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary and is the first from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to publish a novel.