Thursday, Oct. 16, poet Julia Kolchinsky, finalist for the Press' Miller Williams Prize, will give a talk about bearing witness through poetry. The talk will be held in Mullins Library, room 217E, from 12-1:30 p.m. This event is organized by the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies program.

Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS and PARALLAX (University of Arkansas Press, 2025), finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her next book, When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), is a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Shenandoah, and won Michigan Quarterly Review's prize in nonfiction. Kolchinsky is currently working on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, her birthplace.

Kolchinsky, assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University, will share with us her experience as a poet, her creative process and read some of her poems related to bearing witness through poetry, memory and mourning. Lunch will be provided, so RSVP is required by Oct. 9. Please RSVP.