Distinguished Visiting Writers Series

The series brings distinguished writers to the Ithaca College campus—a fiction writer, a nonfiction writer, and a poet each semester—to offer a public reading and teach the Visiting Writers' Workshop, an advanced class that allows IC students the unique opportunity to learn from some of America's foremost writers. 

Mike Scalise is the author of the memoir The Brand New Catastrophe (Sarabande, 2017) which received praise from The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Kenyon Review, Buzzfeed and elsewhere, and won the Christopher Doheny Award for excellence in illness writing from The Center for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Agni and elsewhere. He’s received awards, grants, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Omi, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Ucross, and he was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. He lives in Pittsburgh.  

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Awards finalist, and Tomás Rivera Award winner. Time has recognized it as one of the best YA novels of all time. It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter has also been adapted to the theater at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and Seattle Rep Theater. Most recently Sánchez published a critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books. It won the Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction award in 2022. Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Chicago with her family.