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2026-27 Events

MCLA campus CSI Center

Poetry & Prose Reading by Bonney Hartley and Hannah Fries

Date: Thursday, Oct, 29, 6 p.m.
Location: Feigenbaum Center for Science & Innovation, Atrium
This event is free and open to the public

Bonney Hartley is a member of Stockbridge-Munsee Community, a founding member of Mohican Writers Circle, and a recent graduate from Institute of American Indian Arts for poetry. Her work has been featured in Poetry Northwest, The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press), and Boundless (Amherst College Press). She is a 2024 and 2025 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow, 2025 Forge Project Fellow, and recipient of a 2026 Harpo Fellowship residency at Vermont Studio Center.

Hannah Fries is the author of A Forest Language (Storey), Being with Trees (Storey) and the poetry collection Little Terrarium (Hedgerow Books). Her poetry and prose have appeared in such places as The Marginalian, Terrain.org, Orion, and American Poetry Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. From 2005 to 2014 she was an editor at Orion magazine. She grew up in the woods of New Hampshire and now lives in western Massachusetts with a forester and two tree-climbing kids.

Miciah Bay Gault

Distinguished Fiction Writer, Miciah Bay Gault

Date: Monday, Nov. 2, 6 p.m.
Location: Feigenbaum Center for Science & Innovation, Atrium

Miciah Bay Gault is the author of the novels The Nobody Code and Goodnight Stranger, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson award and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize. Miciah is the Elizabeth Drew professor of fiction at Smith College and core faculty in the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She directed the Vermont Book Awards for ten years. She’s been a fellow at Bread Loaf, a visiting writer at Vermont Studio Center, and the recipient of several Vermont Arts Council grants. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Agni, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, The New York Times Modern Love Column, Poets & Writers, and other places. She lives in Vermont.

2025-26 Events

Crystal Donker

"While Disguised as a Boy: Tales from Archives of Black Life and Literature in the Nineteenth Century" by visiting scholar Dr. Crystal S. Donkor

Date: Monday, April 6 2026
Location: Murdock 218
This event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Donkor is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in African American Literature at Southern Methodist University. Her research interests include nineteenth and early twentieth century African American literature, African American print culture, and the digital humanities. Her monograph in progress, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, analyzes the relationship between pleasure, citizenship, and freedom as represented through the work of nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century Black women writers. Her scholarship can be found in the African American Review and the Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature.