Franklin College will serve as the host of two upcoming events, all part of the Carlson-Stauffer Visiting Writer Series. The Carlson-Stauffer Visiting Writer Series is made possible through a grant from Indiana Humanities in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The series – previously known as the Creative Writing Reading Series – is now named in honor of two retired English professors, Kathy Carlson and Emily Stauffer.

The first event is the YA Fiction Writing Workshop on Wednesday, March 1 from 2:40 – 3:50 p.m. Celebrated YA author Saundra Mitchell will teach young adult fiction writing techniques and lead participants in prompts and exercises. The workshop will meet in Hamilton Auditorium, located inside B.F. Hamilton Library.

Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture-deliverer and a layout waxer. She’s dodged trains, endured basic training, and hitchhiked from Montana to California. For twenty years, she was the head screenwriter and an executive producer with Dreaming Tree Films on their various teen filmmaking programs, including the largest teen filmmaking program in the United States, Fresh Films. The author of nearly twenty books for tweens and teens, Mitchell’s work includes Edgar Award nominee Shadowed Summer and Indiana Author Award Winner and Lambda Nominee All the Things We Do in the Dark. She is the editor of four anthologies for teens, Defy the Dark, All Out, Out Now and Out There.

Next, on Saturday, March 4, Franklin College will partner with Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin to present author Adrian Matejka, in conversation with Walton Muyumba. Matejka will share from his new graphic novel, Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, which tells the story of the first Black heavyweight boxing champion. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in Richardson Chapel on campus. It is free and open to students and educators with an ID. The cost for the general public is $29.99 and includes a signed first-edition copy of the book. Tickets are available at Wild Geese Bookshop or online at: https://www.wildgeesebookshop.com/calendar.

Matejka is an American poet and award-winning writer. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. He is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Originally from Germany as part of a military family, he currently lives in Chicago and is editor of Poetry magazine.

Contact the Franklin College Office of Communications at (317) 738-8185 for more information. 

POSTED Feb 24, 2023