Culturally resonant writers visit St. Thomas
Diverse Voices
The Diverse Voices Series is one of the longest running and most prestigious visiting writers series in Minnesota. Having run for more than three decades under a variety of names, the series has introduced Tommies to a wealth of culturally resonant and internationally famous writers, including Bonnie Jo Campbell, Mary Karr, Jane Smiley, Rita Dove, Barry Lopez, Cheryl Strayed, Emily St. John Madel, and Louise Erdrich.
Each writer selected for the series visits campus to mentor students and lead classes, culminating in a public reading drawing crowds of students, staff, faculty, and members of our local community. Thousands of people have attended a DVS event over the years, and the English department remains committed to selecting the highest quality of writers to engage with our campus and the common good.
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2025-2026 Visiting Writer: V. V. Ganeshananthan
The English Department was proud to host V.V. Ganeshananthan on Monday, October 6th, 2025.
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.
A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
Diverse Voices History
2024
Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times.
2023
Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story (Wesleyan UP: 2026), Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.
2022
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali is the author of Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), in addition to The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), Inquisition (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) All One’s Blue (HarperCollins India, 2016) Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008); The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005) winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and Wind Instrument (Spork Press, 2014).
2021
Matthew Salesses
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023) and the national bestselling craft book Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021). His previous works include the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020) and the Amazon bestseller The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015).
2021
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
2020
Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, Post-Colonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press 2012). She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowships, a USA fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, a New School Fellowship and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship.
2019
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She teaches at Columbia University.
2018
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!—a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—and two books of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance.