Culture
The English Department continues the 25-26 Visiting Writer Series with November visit from Kerri ní Dochartaigh
By: Samantha Imperi
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ATHENS, Ohio – As we move into the final month of the Fall semester, the OU Creative Writing Program is excited to welcome our second visiting writer of the academic year. The English Department has a storied history of bringing notable authors from the US and abroad to campus for public readings and to interact with students in our renowned creative writing program. This year is no different, with a slate of Visiting Writers joining us through the fall and into the winter, leading up to the year’s main event, the Spring Literary Festival in late March 2026.
The upcoming event will feature Irish nonfiction writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh, who will join us virtually from Ireland. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s first book, Thin Places, was published in the spring of 2022 in the US. It was an Indies Introduce selection for Winter/Spring 2022, an Indie Next selection for April 2022, and A Junior Library Guild selection for Spring 2022.
Cacophony of Bone, published in 2023 by Milkweed Press, is her second book. Dochartaigh will also be joined by this year’s visiting professor in the English department, nonfiction writer and OU graduate, Anna Chotlos. Chotlos is an essayist and poet from Madison, Wisconsin. She holds an MA from Ohio University and a PhD in creative writing from the University of North Texas, where she served as editor-in-chief of the American Literary Review. This reading will take place in the Walter Hall Rotunda on Thursday, November 6, at 5 p.m.
While visiting writer events are enriching occasions for the broader Ohio University community to engage with contemporary literature and the voices that create it, these events also provide unique opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students of creative writing to engage in conversations with professionals who are successfully working in their field. As one of the first universities to offer a Ph.D. in Creative Writing beginning in the ’60s, OU has a long history of nurturing the creative arts.
Additionally, Ohio University offers both a Creative Writing undergraduate major and a Ph.D. focus in Creative Writing, a combination only found at a small number of universities in the US. Recent graduates of Ohio University’s Creative Writing program have gone on to produce notable work such as Zoe Bossiere’s acclaimed memoir Cactus Country (Abrams Books, 2024) and Derek JG Williams’ debut poetry collection, Reading Water (Lightscatter Press, 2025), selected by Eduardo Corral as winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize.
This year’s series began in September with a visit from fiction writer Lucy Corin and will continue in January with a visit from poet Kimberly Johnson. All of these events, however, are just the appetizer, setting the stage for the Creative Writing Program’s signature yearly event: the Spring Literary Festival, held annually during the Spring semester since 1986.
This year’s festival will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, March 25-26, 2026, and will feature three writers, one for each of the university’s genres of study: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
All three writers will be scheduled for two events—one lecture and one reading each—making for six opportunities to engage with literature and the profession of writing over the course of two days. Please mark your calendars now and keep an eye out later this year for an announcement of the excellent writers we will be welcoming to campus this spring.