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Welcome to the Wasatch Writers Center—home to creative writing at Weber State!
Upcoming Events
From the Ozarks to Ogden: Poetry Readings by John Dorsey, Justin Hamm, and Jason Ryberg
January 14th - 6pm - Hetzel-Hoellein Room
John Dorsey is the author of around 90 collections of poetry. His most recent collections are Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival (Spartan Press, 2022), and Pocatello Wildflower (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). Dorsey is a 16-time Pushcart Prize nominee, A Best of the Net nominee, a Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2019 Terri Award. His work has appeared in more than 3,000 magazines and anthologies worldwide. He has read or spoken at colleges and universities such as the University of Toledo, Assumption College, Cleveland State University, as well as other assorted venues covering 49 states and several countries. For several years, Dorsey served as a judge for the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo’s Art in Tarta Project, which chose poems to be presented on city transit buses. In 2006, he won the Toledo City Paper’s annual poetry and fiction competition and went on to serve as a judge the following year, before being named the city’s Best Literary Artist in their 2014 reader poll. In 2017, he was appointed to serve as Belle, Missouri’s first city Poet Laureate, and has gone on to found the city’s first literary publication the Gasconade Review, which he edits with Jason Ryberg.
Justin Hamm is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin; six poetry chapbooks; and a book of photographs entitled Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the Museum of Americana. A Woody Guthrie Poet in 2024 and 2022, Justin has also been a 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, a finalist for the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize, and was the winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. Justin’s work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Laurel Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, and other publications. His poetry/photography hybrid exhibition “Midwestern” traveled the Midwest region from 2018-2020, and his current gallery show of collages, “Frames of Reference,’ is now touring the region. Justin currently works as an elementary librarian in the small town of Mexico, Missouri.
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Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks, and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community. He is also an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets)" (Back of the Class Press, 2024). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
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Faculty Spotlight: Readings by Uka Olisakwe, Jan Hamer, Laura Stott, and Sunni Brown Wilkinson
February 25th - 6pm - Hetzel-Hoellein Room
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Ukamaka Olisakwe is a UNESCO Africa39 honoree, a University of Iowa IWP fellow, a VCFA
Emerging Writer Scholarship winner, a Morland Foundation Scholarship finalist, a Gerald Kraak
Prize runner-up, and a Nommo Best Novel Award finalist. Her works have appeared in the New York
Times, Granta, Guernica, Longreads, The Rumpus, Catapult, Google Arts & Culture, and elsewhere. She is
the author of Ogadinma (2020), Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name (2023), and the
founder/editor-in-chief of Isele Magazine. She is currently writing a TV series, Agoodjie, for Canal+
and StudioCanal.
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Jan Hamer came to Weber State University after a law career and has taught English at WSU for the last 21
years, advising Metaphor, the literary and fine arts journal, for nine years. She has served on the Ogden
Arts Advisory Committee for five years as chair of the Literary Subcommittee. Jan is the author of A Storytelling of Ravens, a memoir, released in 2022. She is currently at work on a collection of poetry entitled Fifteen Minutes of Fame, and another memoir, with the working title of Unhinged.
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Laura Stott is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Bear's Mouth (Lynx House Press, 2024) and Blue Nude Migration, a poetry and painting collaboration (Lynx House Press, 2020). Laura is interested in ecopoetics and surrealism; she also loves the intersections of arts and co-teaches a Poetry and Printmaking class here at Weber State University. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies including, Swwim, River Heron Review, and Terrain.org. In 2020, she received a Mayor Award in the Literary Arts from Ogden City.
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Sunni Brown Wilkinson is a poet and essayist. Her forthcoming book, Rodeo, was selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published in April 2025 by Autumn House Press. Other books are The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has also been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
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April 3-5th, 2025 — NULC at Weber State University
April 3-5, 2025 40th Annual National Undergraduate Literature Conference
The National Undergraduate Literature Conference will begin accepting abstract submissions starting November 15, 2024. We look forward to seeing you at Weber State University April 3-5, 2025! Visit their website for more information.
TBA: Railtown Reading Visiting Writers are on their way. Check back soon for more information!
ROAR Open Mics
The ROAR open mics, a cornerstone of our campus community, are being reimagined; more info soon.
Connect with Lindquist College
Weber State University
Val A. Browning Center
Room 312
801-626-6424