Poets to be featured guests of Visiting Writers Series March 16

Northwest Missouri State University’s Visiting Writers Series will feature poets Mary Biddinger, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Allison Joseph as part of its Womxn’s History Month activities.

The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 16, on the Zoom video meeting platform. People interested in attending should register at this link.

Northwest is sponsoring the writers in conjunction with the nationwide observance of Women’s History Month, which the U.S. Congress declared in 1987 that it be celebrated each March. Northwest is calling its month-long celebration Womxn’s History Month to encourage inclusivity and uphold inclusive excellence.

The Visiting Writers Series is designed to enrich Northwest’s educational mission while promoting the values of community, civil discourse and self-expression. Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corporation, Green Tower Press, and the Department of Language, Literature and Writing sponsor the series.

More information about the featured writers is provided below.

For additional information about the Northwest event, contact Daniel Biegelson, the director of the Visiting Writes Series and a senior instructor of English, at dbiegel@nwmissouri.edu or 660.562.1266.

About Mary Biddinger

Biddinger is a writer, editor and professor of English at the University of Akron, where she is on the faculty of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts creative writing program. She is the author of numerous poetry collections and books, including her most recent “Partial Genius: Prose Poems” (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and “Department of Elegy” (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Biddinger’s current project is a flash fiction novella about the adventures of graduate school roommates in late-1990s Chicago.

Her stories can be found at DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, and West Trestle Review. Her poems recently have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, The Hunger, Rogue Agent, and Thrush Poetry Journal.

Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing courses, including contemporary poetry, world literature, women poets, and both introductory and advanced poetry writing. Her Master of Fine Arts course offerings include poetry and hybrid prose workshops and craft and theory courses on themes such as “Poetry of the Body” and “First Books of Poetry.” Since 2008, she has edited the “Akron Series in Poetry” at the University of Akron Press.

Biddinger received the mid-career Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 2019 as well as several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Creative Writing. She also was the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

About Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was 6 years old and is the author of three poetry collections, “The Many Names for Mother” (Kent State University Press, 2019), a winner the Wick Poetry Prize; “Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and “40 Weeks,” forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry,” pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories.

Her poems appear in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and recently relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, with her two kids, cat, dog and husband.

About Allison Joseph

Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she directs the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Southern Illinois University. Born in London, England, to parents of Caribbean heritage, Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx, New York.

A graduate of Kenyon College and Indiana University, she serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, the publisher of No Chair Press and the director of Writers In Common, a writing conference for writers of all ages and experience levels. In 2014, she was awarded a Doctor of Letters honorary degree from her undergraduate alma mater, Kenyon College.

Her books and chapbooks include “What Keeps Us Here” (Ampersand Press), “Soul Train” (Carnegie Mellon University Press), “In Every Seam” (University of Pittsburgh Press), “Worldly Pleasures” (Word Tech Communications), “Imitation of Life” (Carnegie Mellon UP), “Voice: Poems” (Mayapple Press), “My Father’s Kites (Steel Toe Books), “Trace Particles” (Backbone Press), “Little Epiphanies” (NightBallet Press), “Mercurial” (Mayapple Press), “Mortal Rewards” (White Violet Press), “Multitudes” (Word Poetry), “The Purpose of Hands” (Glass Lyre Press), “Double Identity” (Singing Bone Press), “Corporal Muse” (Sibling Rivalry Press) and “What Once You Loved” (Barefoot Muse Press).

She also has published fiction and nonfiction and travels frequently to read from her work at various festivals, conferences and universities. Her latest full-length book of poetry, “Confessions of a Barefaced Woman,” published by Red Hen Press in 2018, was chosen as the Gold/First Place Winner in the poetry category of the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Awards. It also was a 2019 nominee in the poetry category of the NAACP Image Awards and a 2019 finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Da Vinci Eye Book Award, sponsored by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards.