George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program joins Watershed Lit and Mason’s University Libraries in presenting the Spring 2025 Visiting Writers Series.
Writers will meet for afternoon workshops with students from Mason’s MFA program in creative writing and will then participate in programs that same evening—open to the public, with readings and conversations hosted by Mason’s creative writing community.
Evening programs will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in Fenwick Library, either in the Main Reading Room or in Instructional Rooms 1014 A&B.
Book sales are supported by Scrawl Books of Reston, Virginia.
CATHERINE BARNETT (POETRY)
Thursday, February 6, 7:30 p.m.
Fenwick Library Main Reading Room, Room 2001
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times "Best Poetry of 2018" selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU's MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
MARY-ALICE DANIEL (POETRY)
Thursday, April 3, 7:30 p.m.
Fenwick Library Instructional Rooms 1014 A&B
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.
MAKO YOSHIKAWA (NONFICTION)
Thursday, April 10, 7:30 p.m.
Fenwick Library Main Reading Room, Room 2001
Mako Yoshikawa’s first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was a national bestseller, and was translated into six languages. Her second novel, Once Removed, has also been translated. The novels have received critical acclaim and coverage in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Time Out, among other publications. Awards for Mako’s writing include a Bunting Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. Yoshikawa has a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and as a literary critic, she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race.
After her father’s death in 2010, Mako began writing about him and their relationship: essays which have appeared in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Story, LitHub, Longreads, and Best American Essays. These essays became the basis for Secrets of the Sun, her first memoir, which was published in 2024 and was called “incandescent…gorgeous” by Booklist and “deeply felt, eloquent” by Michiko Kakutani.
Mako is a professor of creative writing and the MFA Program Director at Emerson College. She lives with her husband and two unruly cats in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a professor and the director of the creative writing MFA program at Emerson College.
SAM ASHWORTH (FICTION)
Thursday, April 24, 7:30 p.m.
Fenwick Library Main Reading Room, Room 2001
Samuel Ashworth has been a bartender, a dancer, and a reporter. He has gutted seafood in the back of Michelin-starred restaurants and assisted with autopsies in a Pittsburgh hospital. His debut novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney, will be published in March 2025. His fiction and nonfiction appear in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Longreads, Eater, Punch, Hazlitt, Gawker, and so on; he is a former columnist for The Rumpus and is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. He holds an MFA from George Mason University and teaches creative writing at George Washington University. A native New Yorker, he now lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, DC.
October 24, 2024