Distinguished Visiting Writers Series

The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series brings writers to campus to offer a reading and teach an advanced class that offers IC students in the Visiting Writers Workshop the unique opportunity to learn from some of country's foremost writers. All readings are open to the public.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of the books The January Children, Girls That Never Die, Home Is Not A Country, and Bright Red Fruit. Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature . With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet.

Born in Shillong, north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Guardian , The New Republic , Dissent , The Baffler , N+1 , and Caravan . His latest novel is The Light at the End of the World (2023). His latest work of nonfiction is Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India (2024).