The U of A Program in Creative Writing and Translation in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences will welcome poet and translator Becka Mara McKay as its 2024-25 Walton Visiting Writer in Poetry.

McKay will read at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 4, at Pearl's Books, 28 E. Center St., in downtown Fayetteville. The event is free and open to the public, and a book signing will follow the reading.

McKay is the author of three poetry collections: A Meteorologist in the Promised Land (Shearsman, 2010), Happiness Is the New Bedtime (winner of the 2016 Slash Pine Press Chapbook Award) and The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press). She is also the translator of fiction and poetry from Modern Hebrew, including Laundry by Suzane Adam (Autumn Hill, 2008) and Blue Has No South by Alex Epstein (Clockroot, 2010). She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as faculty adviser to Swamp Ape Review. Her recent work has appeared in Witness, Bennington Review, Bombay Literary Journal and elsewhere. She has received support from the Seattle Arts Commission, the American Literary Translators Association, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Each year, the Walton Visiting Writers series in the Program in Creative Writing and Translation brings esteemed authors in poetry, fiction and literary translation to the U of A to give free public readings and to work with graduate students in the creative writing M.F.A. program. Recent Walton Visiting Poets include Kayleb Rae Candrilli in 2023-24, Jane Hirshfield in 2022-23 and Rachel Mennies in 2021-22.

This event is made possible by the Program in Creative Writing and Translation, the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Walton Family Foundation, the Fayetteville Public Library and the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Professorship in Creative Writing.