Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she studies Black poetry. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Her debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was published in 2023 by Copper Canyon Press.

Gwen E. Kirby‘s debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw is available from Penguin Books wherever books are sold. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, she is an assistant professor of English at Carleton College, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Kirby’s stories appear or are forthcoming in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Guest editor Aimee Bender selected her story “Shit Cassandra Saw . . .” for Best Small Fictions 2018. It also appears in the 2018 Wigleaf Top 50 and was anthologized in Flash Fiction America, out from Norton. Her story “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” won the 2017 DISQUIET Literary Prize for Fiction. She has received two Pushcart Prize special mentions and has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Rivendell Writers’ Colony, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She was the 2018-2019 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy and worked for many years at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

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The Writing Seminars hosts a wide array of writers across literary disciplines, including poets, novelists, translators, and biographers. Our regular reading series connects acclaimed writers from around the world with Baltimore communities at Johns Hopkins and beyond.

Our events are always free and open to the public, and include lively Q&A, catered receptions, books signings, and sales in partnership with Greedy Reads. If you would like to receive email announcements about our events, please contact [email protected].