Fall 2025
Our first event will be Thursday, October 9th, 2025, at 6:30pm, in the Peter White Public Library Shiras Room. It's a celebratory NMU alumni reading with 4 authors.
1) Sarah Helen Bates has an MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Michigan University and currently teaches at Southern Utah University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, Boston Review, The Rumpus, Seneca Review, Third Coast, and Hotel Amerika, among others. Her chapbook, Tender, is now available from Diagram New Michigan Press. She lives in coastal Virginia with her partner and labradoodle, Beezus.
2) Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). His recent essays have appeared in Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. Krys is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. He is currently the Edelstein-Keller Writer-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and is writing a collection of essays about his obsession with celebrity chefs.
3) Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024), and editor of In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). Her poetry has been awarded an NEA, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose & poetry appears in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Barrelhouse, Brevity, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and on The Slowdown. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
4) Rebecca Pelky is the author of two poetry collections: Through a Red Place (2021), winner of the Perugia Press Prize, and Horizon of the Dog Woman (Saint Julien Press, 2020). A citizen of the Brothertown Indian Nation, her bilingual poetry interrogates historical and contemporary issues faced by Indigenous peoples in the United States. She is also the recipient of a 2023 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her other books include a translation of Chilean poet Matilde Ladrón de Guevara’s poetry collection, Desnuda (Redhawk Publishing, 2022, co-translated with Jake Young), and Hiking Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 3rd Ed. (FalconGuides, 2020, co-authored with Eric Hansen). As an Assistant Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Pelky teaches creative writing and Native American literatures.
The event will be Thursday, November 13th, 2025, at 6:30pm, at Peter White Public Library- Shiras Room
Featuring NMU MFA student Sara Daniels, winner of the Ron Johnson Memorial Award in Creative Writing.
Jonathan Johnson is the author of seven books, including the new releases Pine, a collection of poems, and The Little Lights of Town, a collection of stories set in his hometown of Marquette and his first book of fiction. An NMU alum (BA, Philosophy, ‘90; MA, English/Creative Writing, ‘92), his work has been featured widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Best Microfiction, and on National Public Radio. He hosts the Poet’s Nook on WNMU, Public Radio 90, and migrates between Marquette; his ancestral glen in the coastal Scottish Highlands; and the Northwest, where he is a professor in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.
