Visiting Writers Series

Jonathan Mathias Lassiter, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York City specializing in culturally informed mental health care for Black, POC, and LGBTQ+ individuals and couples. He also specializes in mental health for literary and performance artists. With a passion to use his Ph.D. for the culture, he serves as a therapist, scientist, educator, author, mental health columnist, on-air mental health expert, and international public speaker. Dr. Lassiter has appeared in such outlets as Forbes, NBC, PBS, Sirius XM, and iHeart Radio. He is the author of How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories: Notes From a Frustrated Black Psychologist, published by Legacy Lit Books. In the book, he tells his story of becoming part of the less than 1% of Black male psychologists, and explains how whiteness limits how we understand and practice mental health. Dr. Lassiter is also the co-editor of the award-winning text Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, published by Lexington Books. Follow Dr. Lassiter on all social media platforms at @lassiterhealth.

Mariah Rigg is the author of the debut short story collection Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, 2025), which has received praise from Oprah Daily, Vulture, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and more. Her work has been featured in The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, and Chicago Review of Books, among others, and has received support from organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lambda Literary. Mariah holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently, she teaches creative writing as a visiting fellow at Mount Holyoke College. 

Amy Bishop-Wycisk (why-zick) is an agent with Trellis Literary Management. With almost a decade of experience, she's cultivating a wide-ranging list in upmarket and book club fiction, grounded sci-fi and fantasy, speculative fiction, expert-driven narrative nonfiction, and select YA, with a special interest in underrepresented voices. Her authors’ books have been NYT, USA Today, and indie bestsellers, a Reese’s Book Club selection, James Beard Award and Edgar Award winners, Indie Next picks, and Book of the Month and B&N Monthly selections. Before diving into the world of publishing, she graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a degree in Creative Writing. You can find her on Instagram at @abw.books.

Danielle Dutton is a Californian who lives in the Midwest. She is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL and the collections Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other and Attempts at a Life. She also wrote the text interpolations in Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera and an illustrated nonfiction chapbook on fiction/visual art called A Picture Held Us Captive. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, The Brooklyn Rail, Music & Literature, Harper’s, BOMB, Fence, NOON, etc. She has written the introduction to books by Renee Gladman, Ann Quin, and Allison Carter. New work is forthcoming in various collaborations with artists Richard Kraft, Magali Reus, and Courtney Stephens. In 2009, Dutton co-founded, with Martin Riker, the award-winning independent press Dorothy, a publishing project. Dutton does the cover and text design/composition for Dorothy’s books. The press’s titles have been listed for or won The National Book Award, The Shirley Jackson Award, The Goldsmiths Prize, The Republic of Consciousness Prize, and others.

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001, while her verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works from Wave Books alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita to Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill and Valerie Hsuing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.

Kathryn Cowles’s third book of poems, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, won the Fence Modern Poets Prize and will be published in December of 2025. Poems from this book won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Manuscript-in-Progress Award, and collages from it were collected together in Feminine Monstrous, a solo art exhibition. Other books include Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions) and Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star), which won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Her poems and poem-photographs have been published in Best American Experimental Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Diagram, Free Verse, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, Verse, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, and elsewhere. She earned her doctorate from the University of Utah and is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she directs (rotating) the Trias Residency for Writers and co-edits the Beyond Category section of Seneca Review.

Donald Revell is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, six volumes of translations from the French, and three volumes of critical writings, including Essay: A Critical Memoir. A former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, he is the winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry. His latest book of poems, Canandaigua (Alice James Books), was named a must-read book of 2024 by both Publishers Weekly and LitHub.