On November 14-15, 2011 the English department hosted Visiting Writer Jeff Hardin, who read from his work and gave a talk on joy in poetry.  Mr. Hardin's poems have appeared in a wide range of journals such as The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, and the Hudson, Gettysburg, Southern, North American, Southwest, Florida, and Southern Poetry reviews.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize almost every year for two decades, and his poems have been featured on Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  He is the author of two chapbooks, Deep in the Shallows (GreenTower Press 2002) and The Slow Hill Out (Pudding House 2003), as well as one book, Fall Sanctuary, winner of the 2004 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press.  

On September 26-27, 2011, Mark Richard, novelist and author of the critically-acclaimed memoir House of Prayer No. 2, read from his most recent work.  Author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and a bestselling novel, Fishboy, Mr. Richard currently teaches in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California.  Mr. Richard's awards include the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has published fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Grand Street, Shenandoah, The Quarterly, Equator, and Antaeus, as well as articles in the New York Times, Harper's, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, and The Oxford American. He has been a correspondent for the BBC and a writer-producer for several television series, including Party of Five on Fox.  Richard has also written scripts for CBS’s Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, Showtime’s Emmy-winning series Huff, and Chicago Hope on CBS, as well as the screen-play for the movie Stop-Loss, produced by Paramount. He is currently writer / producer for Hell on Wheels, a new dramatic series for AMC.

On March 28-29, 2011, novelist Erin McGraw and poet and memoirist Andrew Hudgins of Ohio State University lectured on Robert Frost and Flannery O'Connor and read from their respective works. Ms. McGraw is the author of five books, most recently The Good Life (Mariner 2004) and The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (Mariner 2008). Her stories and personal essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, the Kenyon, Gettysburg, and Missouri reviews, and Image.  Mr. Hudgins' most recent works include American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and Shut Up, You're Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (Overlook Press, 2009).  His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Poetry, and many other journals.  His volume Saints and Strangers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; After the Lost War: A Narrative was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of The Poet's Prize. Hudgins is also a recipient of the Witter Bynner Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Haines Prize for poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, he was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. 

Other past visting writers include the poet Daniel Anderson; novelist Dennis Covington; biographer and poet Paul Mariani; novelists Ron Hansen and Tony Earley; poets Dave Smith, Daniel Tobin, Scott Cairns, B. H. Fairchild, and Kate Daniels; and prose writers Doris Betts and Thomas Lynch.