Visiting Writers Series

Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of the novel, FALSE PROPHET (2026, Melville House), and the forthcoming essay collection, THE CREEPS: MEDITATIONS ON HORROR (Fall 2027, University of Iowa Press).

His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Kathleen Spada writes at the intersection of memory, place, and the stories families inherit. Her work explores how forgotten lives, hidden histories, and the landscapes we inhabit continue to shape who we become.

She is the author of WARD: A Memoir of Ghosts, Grandmothers, and Little Girls Who Disappear, a literary memoir born from the discovery that her mother had been sold as a child and raised under a false identity. What began as a search for historical truth became a journey through archives, forgotten places, family silence, and the enduring presence of women whose stories refused to disappear.

Kathleen holds a PhD in Literary Nonfiction and Composition/Rhetoric from the University of Cincinnati. Her research has been supported by fellowships and awards, including the PEO Scholar's Award. She teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at Northern Kentucky University, where she helps writers discover the stories only they can tell.

She lives in Kentucky and is currently at work on her second book, ESTHER, which continues the investigation begun in WARD by asking not simply what happened—but why.

Lisa Low is the author of Replica (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026) and the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023). She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago.

Uche Okonkwo has an MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech, and a master’s in Creative Writing from University of Manchester. She is currently a Ph.D. student in English at University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, One Story, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Lagos Noir, Ellipsis, Saraba, and others. She has received residencies, scholarships, and grants from MacDowell, Elizabeth George Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Art Omi Writers’ Residency, Anderson Center, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. She was the 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy and is a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow.

Okonkwo’s debut book, A Kind of Madness, was published by Tin House (US) in April 2024, Verve Books (UK) in 2025, and Narrative Landscape Press (Nigeria) in 2025. She is represented by Renée Zuckerbrot of MMQ&A Literary.Replace with your text

Renée Zuckerbrot became an agent at Massie McQuilkin & Altman after working as an editor at Doubleday. Authors represented by Renée have won or been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, The National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Award, The Caine Prize for African Writing, the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography, the PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, the National Magazine Award, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, B&N's Discover Great New Writers Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus, the Hugo, the Nebula, the Pushcart, and others. She is a member of the AALA and Authors Guild. She represents commercial and literary fiction--she has a soft spot for short story collections--and science, popular culture, and history in the nonfiction space.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous books, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Theory for Moving Houses, a three-part lecture on line, color, and consciousness, was published this year. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Since 2017, Gladman has exhibited her works on paper in galleries in the U.S. and across Europe. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley.