Williston Northampton is pleased to announce the lineup for our fall Writers’ Workshop series. Writers’ Workshop is an elective for Williston students, and the trimester-long course involves the study of a visiting author, culminating in the writers’ visits and a community-wide reading. The series has brought multiple award-winning authors and poets to campus, including Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners. It was originally started in 1998 by two parents of then-Williston students. The program started with two visiting authors, and has since blossomed to include scholars from myriad of writing fields. This year will be the 26th time Williston has offered the Writers’ Workshop series.
This year’s visiting authors are:
- T Kira Madden (Sept. 16)
- Akil Kumarasamy (Sept. 23)
- Noor Hindi (Oct. 14)
- Elizabeth Mikesch (Oct. 21)
T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and magician living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. She holds a master’s in writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a bachelor’s in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. Her debut novel, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian memoir. According to her biography on the Sarah Lawrence website: “She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA artist fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.”
Akil Kumarasamy released her debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, in 2022. The book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was also shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. A collection of short stories titled Half Gods was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Spotlight Award. Other writings of hers have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and many others. She is currently an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024-25 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Noor Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham scheduled for publication in 2025.
Elizabeth Mikesch is the author of Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me, published in 2014. Her writing has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including BOMB, The Believer, Unsaid, Sleepingfish, and Caketrain. In 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for an interdisciplinary project connected to a manuscript she wrote, The Bottom. In addition to writing, Mikesch also teaches creative writing and composition at Smith College, UMass, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project.