Visiting Writers Forum
The Creative Writing Department is pleased to announce the Visiting Writers Forum. Every Creative Writing major at Ringling College participates in the Visiting Writers Forum by reading samples of an author’s work before attending an on-campus reading and talk. There’s also time allowed for a craft-focused Q&A. Students will discover the various blueprints for success as a writer directly from successful, working writers in the field. Visiting professionals include local poets, graphic novelists, newspaper editors, literary agents, screenwriters, and novelists.
All events are on a Tuesday evening, 7 to 8:15pm. Free and open to the public, and will be available via Zoom. To receive the Zoom links in advance and receive reminders of the Visiting Writers Forum events, please sign up here.
Please email creativewriting@ringling.edu with any questions.
Sponsored by:
2022 Schedule
Spring 2022
Brooke Vitale
Date: Tuesday, Feb 8, 2022
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm eastern
Location: Via Zoom
Brooke Vitale is a children’s book editor with nearly twenty years’ 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 favorites (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
Date: Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm eastern
Location: Via Zoom
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
Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm eastern
Location: Via Zoom
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
Date: Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm Eastern
Location: Via Zoom
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 at Kotaku, The Atlantic, Quartz and other venues.
Cameron has a monthly podcast (Just King Things) where he and his co-host are reading and discussing 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.
2021 Schedule
Fall 2021
Erik Bork
Date: Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm eastern
Location: Via Zoom and Twitch
Erik Bork won two Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for his work as a writer-producer on the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon, for executive producer Tom Hanks (and Steven Spielberg, on Band of Brothers). Erik has sold original series pitches to the broadcast networks, worked on the writing staff of primetime drama series, and written feature screenplays for Universal, HBO, TNT, and Playtone. He teaches for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, and National University’s MFA Program in Professional Screenwriting. He has also been called one of the “Top Ten Most Influential Screenwriting Bloggers” for his website, Flyingwrestler.com, and offers consulting and coaching to writers at all levels. His book The Idea: The 7 Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction was released in September 2018.
Twitter: @flyingwrestler
Rachel Harrison
Date: Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm eastern
Location: Via Zoom and Twitch
Rachel Harrison is the author of the forthcoming novel Cackle. Her debut, The Return, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and as an Audible Original. She lives in Western New York with her husband and their cat/overlord.
Brooke Burgess
Date: Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm Eastern
Location: Via Zoom and Twitch
After a youth in eastern Canada spent daydreaming, reading, role-playing, and scribbling through plays and short stories, Brooke officially started his jack-of-all-trades narrative career as a writer, producer, and voice director on AAA titles for software giant Electronic Arts. These days, he continues to consult as a writer for the video game industry while acting as a consulting creative for all things transmedia, directing voiceover, speaking, and lecturing, while creating exciting original IP on multiple platforms. One of Brooke’s most noteworthy projects is being writer/creator of the world’s first motion-comic epic, Broken Saints.
Spring 2021
Stephen Graham Jones
Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:15pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
Stephen says that he’s “the author of 23 or 25 or so books, 300+ stories, some comic books, and other stuff. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one Ph.D., and way too many boots.”
Stephen is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Although his recent work is often classified as horror, he is celebrated for applying literary stylings to a variety of speculative genres. Currently, he serves as the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Rob Sanders
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:15pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
Rob Sanders is a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes. For many years, he worked at Mintz Elementary School in Brandon, FL, where he taught students about books and words and reading and writing. Each day, he headed back home to write fierce and funny picture books for kids. Now he’s freshly retired from teaching, yet Rob still likes to grow things, teach things, learn things, and read things.
He’s the author of many picture books, including Outer Space Bedtime Race, Rodzilla, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag, Mayor Pete: The Story of Pete Buttigieg, Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights, and Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution.
Banana Chan
Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:15pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
An RPG designer and videographer originally from Ontario, Canada, Banana Chan is one half of the board game publishing company Game and a Curry. She enjoys writing smaller, weirder LARPs that are too obscure to function. She currently lives in New York, where she creates videos, writes games on the subway, and eats lasagna.
Her most recent successful Kickstarter project was Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall—“An RPG of Chinese immigrants running the family restaurant by day, and dealing with the hauntings of Jiangshi by night!”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Date: Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:15pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a bestselling book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Calvin Alexander Ramsey
Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Time: 7:00 – 8:15pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
Calvin Alexander Ramsey was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in Roxboro, NC. It has been his ambition to become a writer since childhood, a dream he fully realized when five days before the 9/11 bombings in 2001, Ramsey says he “found his voice.” He’s now a playwright, photographer, painter, and children’s book author.
Ramsey says his work is guided by the African proverb: “When an old person dies, it’s like a library burning down.” To impede permanent losses from the annals of history, he researches each topic religiously, consulting original documentation, secondary sources, and persons who may have survived the era he is addressing. With the objective of shedding light on the overlooked and sometimes missing pages of African American history, Ramsey’s writings stimulate, educate, and bring the audience closer to a truth in American history—a truth that does not always reflect a reality that is easy to view.
Past Visiting Writers
Fall 2020
Cheryl Klein
Cheryl Klein is the editorial director at Lee & Low Books. She is also the author of two adult books, The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults and Second Sight: An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults, and three picture books, Wings, Thunder Trucks, and A Year of Everyday Wonders. Prior to her work at Lee & Low, she spent sixteen years at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, where she published a wide array of acclaimed titles and served as the continuity editor for the last two books of the Harry Potter series. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Elizabeth Sims
Elizabeth Sims learned the art of fiction by listening to tall tales on her father’s knee, and by reading all sorts of books brought home by her mother, a teacher. (These ranged from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to the Canterbury Tales, from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ernest Hemingway.)
Today Elizabeth is the author of the Rita Farmer Mysteries, the Lambda and GCLS Goldie Award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series, and other fiction. Her work has been published by a major press (Macmillan) as well as several smaller houses, and she’s written short works for numerous collections and magazines. She publishes independently under her personal imprint, Spruce Park Press.
In addition, Elizabeth is an internationally recognized authority on writing. She’s written dozens of feature articles on the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest magazine, where she’s a contributing editor. Through her articles, coaching, and editing, she has helped thousands of fledgling authors find their win.
Kwame Alexander
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, and New York Times Bestselling author of 37 books, including SWING, THE WRITE THING, REBOUND, which was shortlisted for prestigious Carnegie Medal, Caldecott-Medal and Newbery-Honor winning picture book THE UNDEFEATED, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, HOW TO READ A BOOK, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, and, his NEWBERY medal-winning middle grade novel, THE CROSSOVER.
The Host and Executive Producer of the television program, WordPlay, a new kids television program, Kwame is also a regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, and the recipient of numerous awards, including The Coretta Scott King Author Honor, Three NAACP Image Award Nominations, and the 2017 Inaugural Pat Conroy Legacy Award. In 2018, he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded. Kwame currently serves as the inaugural Innovator-in-Residence at the American School in London, and the Founding Editor of VERSIFY, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that aims to Change the World One Word at a Time.
Alex Rubens
Writers Guild Award-winning, three-time Emmy Award-nominated writer Alex Rubens is an executive producer of The Twilight Zone, a co-executive producer of Rick and Morty, and one of the luckiest people ever to walk the earth. He’s gotten to work on projects like Key & Peele, Community, Big Mouth, and Long Shot, and to cowrite the major motion picture Keanu with Academy Award-winning writer Jordan Peele. He has also worked as a teacher, a tutor, a ghostwriter, a script reader, a transcriptionist, a cashier, a personal assistant, and a dishwasher. He was born in New York and now lives in California with his wife and their cat.
Ann VanderMeer
Over a 30-year career, Ann VanderMeer has won numerous awards for her editing work, including the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award. Whether as editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years or in her current role as an acquiring editor for Tor.com, Ann has built her reputation on acquiring fiction from diverse and interesting new talents. As co-founder of Cheeky Frawg Books, she has helped develop a wide-ranging line of mostly translated fiction. Featuring a who’s who of world literature, Ann VanderMeer’s anthologies include the critically acclaimed Best American Fantasy series, The Weird, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, and the forthcoming Big Book of SF (Vintage).
Spring 2020
Lucienne Diver
Lucienne Diver works as a literary agent for the Knight Agency. She’s also a novelist, having authored the Vamped young adult series and the Latter-Day Olympians series, among other books. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many anthologies, including Strip-Mauled and Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories. Lucienne “lived in Florida with her husband and daughter, the two cutest dogs in the world, and enough books to fill an entire store and perhaps some day collapse the second floor of her home into the first.”
Craig Pittman
Native Floridian Craig Pittman was born in Pensacola, and he graduated from Troy State University (Alabama) where his muckraking work for the student newspaper prompted an agitated dean to label him “the most destructive force on campus.” He has since covered a variety of newspaper beats and quite a few natural disasters, including “hurricanes, wildfires, and the Florida Legislature.” As a Tampa Bay Times reporter, Pittman chronicles some of our state’s weirdest and wackiest moments, some of which went on to appear in his book Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country.
