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Georgia K. Johnston Writer-in-Residency Program

Deborah Taffa

Sept. 30–Oct. 4, 2024

4 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 2: Nonfiction Reading
Adorjan Hall, Room 142, 3800 Lindell Blvd.

4 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 3: Craft Talk
Adorjan Hall, Room 142, 3800 Lindell Blvd.

Headshot of Deborah Taffa
   

Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers Workshop and is the director of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in venues such as the Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, and The Best Travel Writing. Additionally, she holds several prestigious fellowships, including from MacDowell and the Kranzberg Arts Center. Awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, her memoir Whiskey Tender (HarperCollins) was named one of 2024’s most anticipated books. The Washington Post described her memoir as a “mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories” and as an “excavation of a particular place and time … What sets Taffa’s memoir apart is its study of the political, racial, and ancestral forces that shape a life.” 

For more information, contact Devin Johnston in the Department of English.

Hoa Nguyen

Feb. 24–28, 2025

4 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 26: Poetry Reading
Adorjan Hall, Room 142, 3800 Lindell Blvd.

4 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 27: Craft Talk
Adorjan Hall, Room 142, 3800 Lindell Blvd.

Hoa Nguyen headshot
 

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books, including Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, was a finalist for a 2021 National Book Award, the General Governor’s Literary Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Nguyen lives in Toronto with her family, where she serves as a visiting practitioner for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University and as a mentor for writers in the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto. She is a member of She Who Has No Masters (SWHNM), a Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporic transnational collective of cis, trans, and nonbinary women/womyn, and founding mentor of the SWHNM mentorship. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award.

For more information, contact Devin Johnston in the Department of English.

About the Residence Program

The Georgia K. Johnston Writer-in-Residence program is made possible by a generous bequest from a former faculty member in the SLU English Department. Professor Georgia Johnston died in 2017 after a long illness. She was a specialist in modernist literature and LGBTQ culture and theory, as well as an accomplished poet.