English Department to Welcome Author Venita Blackburn Sept. 21

The English Department welcomes the Meredith community to a reading by author Venita Blackburn on Wednesday, September 21, at 7 p.m. in Jones Auditorium. 

Venita brings an innovative voice to short fiction; her work has appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017.  She served on the Sewanee Writers’ Conference faculty in 2022. 

In addition, she is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl (2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

The event is free and open to the public.  Books will be available for purchase.