Visiting Writers Forum

Bob Plunket (September 12, 2023)

Robert Plunket was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1945 but raised in Havana and Mexico City. He is the author of the novels Love Junkie and My Search for Warren Harding, and he has written for Healthy Aging, This Week in Ft. Myers Beach, and Sarasota Magazine. He is currently retired and lives in a trailer park in Englewood, Florida, where he enjoys collecting old quilts and raising succulents from scratch.

Stan West (October 3, 2023)

A former foreign correspondent for the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, Stan West remains a working journalist, reporting for the Wednesday Journal and WPNA-AM. He’s been a conflict journalist and culture reporter for most of his career. A documentarian who co-coordinates the Oak Park International Film Festival, West has written and co-authored several award-winning nonfiction books, including Suburban Promised Land. West teaches in the Ringling College of Art and Design Creative Writing program.

Jarret Keene (October 17, 2023)

Jarret Keene earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University. A beloved and highly sought-after professor, Keene is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches American literature and the graphic novel. He has written a travel guide, a rock band biography, poetry collections, and edited short-fiction anthologies, including Las Vegas Noir and Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas. His most recent book is Hammer of the Dogs, a science fiction dystopian novel.

Roy Peter Clark (November 14, 2023)

By some accounts, Roy Peter Clark is America’s writing coach, devoted to creating a nation of writers. A Ph.D. in medieval literature, he is widely considered the most influential writing teacher in the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper journalism. Clark has authored or edited more than twenty books about writing, reading, language, and journalism. Humorist Dave Barry has said of him: “Roy Peter Clark knows more about writing than anybody I know who is not currently dead.” Clark lives with his family in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he has become famously fond of pelicans.

Cooper Levey-Baker (January 24, 2023)

Cooper Levey-Baker is a writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review and Burrow Press’s Fantastic Floridas series, and his journalism has won multiple awards from the Florida Magazine Association and the Florida Society for Professional Journalism. Dead Fish Wind is his first novel.

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Ken Hite (February 21, 2023)

For more than 20 years, Ken Hite has worked as a full-time writer and role-playing game designer, contributing to many popular games including GURPS, Mage: The Ascension, Savage Worlds, and the Star Trek role-playing game. He’s the author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents role-playing games, and he serves as lead designer on the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. Since 2012, he’s run Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, a weekly podcast with fellow author and game designer Robin Laws.

In addition, Hite is Ringling College’s Creative Writing 2023 Writer in Residence and will be a guest expert in the Anyone’s Game Tabletop Game Design Conference.

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Ryan Rivas (March 21, 2023)

Ryan Rivas is the author of Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus 2022). He is the Publisher of Burrow Press, and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program. Rivas is a former Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, and his work has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere.

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Sarah N. Fisk (April 18, 2023)

Sarah N. Fisk (they/them) is a former mechanical engineer who made the switch to publishing in 2011. They have worked in the publishing industry as an editorial assistant, author’s assistant, publicist, and art director. Fisk is a former Pitch Wars mentor, board member, and Agent Liaison. They host the podcast Queries, Qualms, & Quirks and have a passion for spreadsheets. In addition to serving as a literary agent at Tobias Literary Agency, Fisk writes YA novels as Sarah Nicolas and romance under the name Aria Kane.

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Brooke Vitale (February 8, 2022)

Brooke Vitale is a children’s book editor with nearly 20 years of experience at some of the world’s top publishing companies, including Penguin/Random House and Disney. Over the course of her career, she’s edited thousands of traditionally published and self-published children’s books. Among her favorite (and most successful) published books were Hide and Hug Olaf by Kevin Lewis, which sold over 400,000 copies, and Olaf’s Night Before Christmas, which sold over 250,000 copies.

But she’s more than just a children’s book editor. She’s also a children’s book author in her own right, with more than 100 published books. Among her favorites that she’s written are The Magic is in You, The Muppet’s Christmas Carol, The Goonies: The Illustrated Storybook, the Timmi Tobbson Young Explorers chapter book series, and numerous Star Wars: The Mandalorian books.

Migdalia Cruz (March 1, 2022)

Migdalia Cruz is an award-winning playwright who has written more than fifty plays, operas, screenplays, and musicals. Her work has been produced across the U.S. and abroad at various venues including Mabou Mines, Classic Stage Company, Playwrights Horizons, INTAR, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others. Her plays include Salt, Fur, Miriam’s Flowers, Lucy Loves Me, Dreams of Home, Telling Tales, ¡CHE-CHE-CHE!, Latins In La-La Land, Cigarettes and Moby-Dick, Lolita de Lares, Yellow Eyes, and Running For Blood: No. 3 (a radio play). Cruz wrote book and lyrics for the musicals Rushing Waters, Welcome Back to Salamanca and When Galaxy Six and The Bronx Collide; the libretto for an opera, Street Sense; and lyrics and monologues for Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo.

In 1996, she received the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Award for Another Part of The House, and she has been honored with the Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award. Her recent projects include Yellow Eyes at Visión Latino in Chicago and Latins in La-La Land at College of Wooster, Ohio. She is currently writing a play about Chekhov, marriage, consumption, and the writing of Three Sisters as Chekhov is dying.

Sigrid Nunez (March 29, 2022)

Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It was also a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. This year she was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Currently teaching in the MFA program in creative writing at Hunter College, she has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Cameron Kunzelman (April 19, 2022)

Cameron Kunzelman is a game critic whose work appears regularly at Paste Games, where he is Editor at Large, and at Waypoint, where his weekly Postscript column deals with endings, death, and final bosses. His writing has also appeared in Kotaku, The Atlantic, Quartz, and other venues.

Kunzelman has a monthly podcast (Just King Things) where he and his co-host read and discuss all of Stephen King’s books in publication order. He also creates his own games and interactive stories, such as Epanalepsis, Alpaca Run, and Catachresis: A Way Too Scary Game.

Daniel Knauf (September 27, 2022)

Daniel Knauf is an American television screenwriter, producer, and comic book writer. Knauf worked as a health insurance broker for 22 years before he sold his first TV show, Carnivàle, to HBO. The show lasted two of its six proposed seasons and earned 15 Emmy nominations, winning five. Following Carnivàle, Knauf produced and wrote on the hit STARZ series Spartacus: Blood and Sand and served as writer-showrunner on Dracula for NBC. Knauf also served as executive producer and writer on 66 episodes of the NBC hit series The Blacklist (2014-17) starring James Spader. He has also worked on the Marvel comics Iron Man and Eternals.

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Kevin Coval (September 27, 2022)

Cancelled due to Hurricane Ian

Kevin Coval is an Emmy-nominated, award-winning poet, playwright, author, screenwriter, and editor of more than 10 collections and anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the age of Hip-Hop and A People’s History of Chicago. Coval is a creative consultant and founder of Breakbeat Creatives, a creative agency that helps brands such as Apple, Nike, Adidas, Beats, Gatorade, and more, tell stories, build innovative programming, and connect to local artistic communities in authentic and meaningful ways. His writing has been featured on/in The Daily Show, National Public Radio, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Source Magazine, Slam and WSLAM, Rock the Bells, Sarasota Magazine, CNN.com, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

Heather Sellers (October 18, 2022)

A Florida native, Heather Sellers, is the author of writing craft books, poetry collections, children’s books, a short story collection, and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, which was featured in O, the Oprah Magazine, the Today Show, Good Morning America, The Rachael Ray Show, and NPR. Her recent essays appear in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Sun, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Haywire” was selected for the Best American Essays by Leslie Jamison and “Pedal, Pedal, Pedal,” won a Pushcart Prize in 2018. She is the director of the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida.

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Gloria Muñoz (November 15, 2022)

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian-American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy and writing. She’s the author of Danzirly/Dawn’s Early, which was selected for the 2019 Ambroggio Prize by Rosa Alcalá. She’s also the recipient of the New York Summer Writer’s Institute Fellowship, a Creative Pinellas Artist Grant, the USF Humanities Institute Poetry Award, and a Think Small to Think Big Artist Grant. Muñoz has worked alongside botanists, musicians, dancers, historians, classicists, visual artists, conservationists, and neuroscientists. Muñoz is a co-founder of Pitch Her Productions and she’s one-half of the songwriting team Moonlit Musíca.

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