The Creative Writing program at Ball State has quite a few events coming up in Spring 2026. We hope to see you there!

#1 Creative Writing in the Community Workshop

March 21st at Maring Hunt Library, 1-3 pm

  • Learn more about Creative Writing in the Community

#2 In Print Festival of First Books

Day 1: Wednesday, March 25 in the Student Center Ballroom

7:00-8:30pm                  Reading

8:30-9:00pm                  Book Signing

Day 2: Thur. March 26th in the Student Center Ballroom

7:00-7:30pm                   The Broken Plate Featured Readers

7:30-8:30pm                   Panel on Literary Publishing (with Ron Mitchell from Southern Indiana Review)

8:30-9:00pm                   Book Signing with Visiting Writers

Poetry

an African American woman in a flowered shirt

Yalie Saweda Kamara (Poetry)

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, researcher, and educator from Oakland, Ca. She is the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Emerita and the 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year. Her debut poetry collection, Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024), was the winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize and is the winner of the 2025 Ohio Book Award in Poetry. She is also the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022). Among her honors, Kamara has received fellowships from Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle and received residencies from the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi, and Smith College.

Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. An assistant professor of English at Xavier University, she teaches courses in global and diasporic literature, creative writing, and hip-hop studies.

For more, please visit her website: www.yaylala.com

 

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Geoff Peck (Fiction)

Fiction

Geoff Peck is a writer and professor at Winona State University. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and his PhD from the University of North Dakota.

In total, his fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and book reviews have appeared in over thirty journals. He was nominated for Best New American Poets after winning the Thomas McGrath Prize by the Academy of American Poets, and his debut novel, City of Clans was published by the University of Iowa Press.

For more, please visit his website at https://www.geoff-peck.com/.

Creative Nonfiction

a woman with long dark hair

Nicole Graev Lipson (CNF)

Nicole Graev Lipson is the USA Today bestselling author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues.

Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, reprinted in The Best American Essays, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. Lipson received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and lives outside of Boston with her family.

For more, please visit her website at https://nicolegraevlipson.com/.

 

 

a man with blue checked shirt, grey hair, and glasses

Ron Mitchell, editor

Editing

Formerly muscle for the Internal Revenue Service, Ron Mitchell is the editor of Southern Indiana Review and SIR Press, publisher of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize.

He teaches literary editing & publishing at the University of Southern Indiana.

For more, please visit the website of the Southern Indiana Reviewand SIR Press. 

 

 

 

 

A woman with brown hair and glasses

Jill Christman, editor of River Teeth and author of The Heart Folds Early

#3 River Teeth Issue & Book Launch w/ Jill Christman

Thursday, April 9, 7:30 – 9:00 pm
Student Center, Multipurpose Room + Billiards Room

 

 

#4 Graduate Student Reading

Friday April 17 in Teachers College 1008, time TBA

  • Featuring students graduating with their MA in English/Creative Writing

#5  Celebrating National Poetry Month

A man in silhouette.

Austin Segrest

Tuesday, April 21st -5-6:15 P.M. AJ 225

Austin Segrest is the author of the poetry collections Groom (Unbound Edition Press, 2025) and Door to Remain (UNT Press, 2022). Door to Remain won the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, the Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award for Poetry, and was a Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award Semifinalist.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Austin is an Associate Professor of English at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. Austin holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing (Poetry) from The University of Missouri (2014) and an MFA from Georgia State University (2009). A former poetry editor of The Missouri Review, he has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Ucross Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the NEH. His poems can be found in POETRY, VQR, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, The Common, New England Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. His essays can be found in APR, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Southern Humanities Review, On the Seawall, and Pleiades. For more, please visit his website at https://www.austinsegrest.com/.

a woman with brown hair and a red sweater

Melissa Range

Melissa Range is the winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize for Printer’s Fist, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in 2026, as well as the author of Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010).

She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. For more, please visit her website at https://melissarange.com/.

Claire McQueery

Claire McQuerry earned her PhD from the University of Missouri, where she held a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. Dr. McQuerry has MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, and a BA in English and French from Gonzaga University. She has served as the Contests Editor at The Missouri Review and as International Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review and has been the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg Prize.

Her poetry collection Lacemakers (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have been published in Tin House, Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. She has published essays in Creative Nonfiction and Oregon Quarterly, one of which was a Best American Essays Notable Essay for 2010.