** Hope College is among the colleges and universities across the nation that have shifted to remote instruction to help stem the spread of COVID-19, with in-person instruction scheduled to resume on Tuesday, April 14. Correspondingly, all college-sponsored events through Monday, April 13, have been canceled. For more information on the Hope College response to the virus, please visit hope.edu/coronavirus. **
Hope College’s Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series will feature Kaveh Akbar and Dawn Davies on Thursday, March 26.
The authors will hold a Q&A session at 3:30 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center and a reading at 7 p.m. in the John and Dede Howard Recital Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Kaveh Akbar is a poet, professor and advocate for highlighting talented voices in poetry. In
addition to his debut full-length collection “Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” his poems have
appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House,
APR and PBS NewsHour. He is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg
Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry
Society of America, a Levis Reading Prize and two Pushcart Prizes among other recognitions.
His interview project “Divedapper” features extended dialogues with more than 70 prominent
contemporary poets. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University
and the Randolph College and Warren Wilson low-residency MFA programs. His second
poetry collection is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021.
Dawn Davies earned her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University, where she
won the FIU Provost’s Award for Best Creative Project and the FIU Creative Writing
Award in Nonfiction among other honors for her nonfiction work. She also worked as
the fiction editor of the Gulf Stream Literary Magazine. Her essays have been published
in journals such as McSweeney’s Quarterly, Narrative, The Missouri Review and Arts
& Letters. Written in a series of essays exploring relationships, marriage, motherhood
and chronic illness among other experiences, her memoir “Mothers of Sparta” drew critical
recognition and won the Florida Book Award as well as the Great Lakes Colleges Association
New Writers Award. Davies lives in Florida and occasionally teaches creative writing.
More information about the series can be found online at hope.edu/jrvws.
Audience members who need assistance to fully enjoy any event at Hope are encouraged to contact the college’s Events and Conferences Office by emailing events@hope.edu or calling 616-395-7222 on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street. The Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts is located at 221 Columbia Ave., between Ninth and 10th streets.