When you study creative writing at Mount Mercy, you learn not only from your fellow students and our faculty, but also from the many prestigious writers who visit campus and share their expertise and vision.
Every semester Mount Mercy University hosts at least one visiting writer. During each visit, there is a Q&A—your time to ask the writers questions—and an evening reading—the writers' time to share their most recent work with you. You'll also have the chance to chat with the visiting writers over dinner or while they are signing your book.
Past visiting writers include poet laureates, award-winning journalists, best-selling novelists, and Oprah-picks.
Visiting Writers: Spring 2018
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James McKean Mount Mercy Professor Emeritus James McKean has published three books of poems—Headlong (1987), Tree of Heaven (1995), and We Are the Bus (2011)—and two books of essays, Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports (2005) and a new collection, Bound, which pays tribute to the women in McKean’s family.
McKean’s poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest among others, and have been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His nonfiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Gettysburg Review, and The Iowa Review, and his essays have been reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing 2003 and the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology. McKean teaches for the Queens University low-residency MFA program, the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. |
Mount Mercy University has proudly hosted poet laureates, best-selling novelists, and writers who have won the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize.
Fiction Writers
Sandra Benitez, Chris Bohjalian, Charles Baxter, Ethan Canin, Ana Castillo, Lan Samantha Chang, K. L. Cook, Stuart Dybek, Larry Heinemann, Khaled Hosseini, Bharati Mukherjee, Thisbe Nissen, ZZ Packer, Josef Skvorecky, Barry Unsworth, Mary Helen Stefaniak, Benjamin Percy, Samrat Upadhyay, Daniel Orozco, Karen Russell, Cristina Henriquez, Keith Lesmeister
Creative Nonfiction Writers and Journalists
Amy Butcher, Anne-Marie Cusac, Joy Castro, Matt Freedman, Patricia Hampl, Alex Kotlowitz, John T. Price, Scott Russell Sanders, Patricia Foster, Tim Wise
Poets
Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Robert Haas, Ted Kooser, Li-Young Lee, Heather McHugh, Czeslaw Milosz, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Gary Soto, William Stafford, Camille Dungy, Michael Sowder, Frank X Walker, Jennifer Perrine, Drew Dellinger
"Visiting writers . . . let you see and know the process of a professional." —Casey Birkecht '13
"The joy of the Visiting Writers Program is about connecting to a kindred soul. Aspiring writers are able to discuss their own fears and doubts with someone who has experienced the journey." —Kim Flugga-Ciha ’11