University of Indianapolis Announces 2026-2027 Kellogg Writers Series
The Kellogg Writers Series at the University of Indianapolis announced its 2026-2027 season. The series features four critically acclaimed writers from across the country who represent a variety of genres and works.
“A hootenanny is what we’ll be having,” said Barney Haney, associate professor of English and chair of the Kellogg Writers Series. “Melissa Frateriggo’s essays should be required reading. This is the clear-eyed sex education we need; the scope, the humanness, a real gem. C. Russell Price goes beyond the beyond with his second poetry collection. Gay cowboy cabaret, fun and raunch and urgent purpose, and a blue ghost horse named Bisquick who just wants to dance! Afsheen Farhadi’s debut novel is a spellbinding, high-wire act with a narrator who risks it all, the kind of book you stay up way too late reading. And Bernardo Wade’s debut poetry collection is so strikingly beautiful; you feel its warmth spreading through you as you read, and it stays there all day. Oh my chickens! We are going to have so much fun! Get these books and get to UIndy! We have a seat waiting for you.”
All readings are free to attend (no advance registration required) and open to the public! LP credit is available for UIndy students who attend.
This series is made possible by the generous endowment of Allen and Helen Kellogg.
This year’s series will feature readings from the following writers:
Melissa Fraterrigo
Memoir Reading
Tuesday, September 29, 2026, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
UIndy Hall, Schwitzer Student Center
Photo courtesy of the author.
Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the memoir in essays, “The Perils of Girlhood” (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), and also the novel, “Glory Days” (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and the short story collection, “The Longest Pregnancy” (Livingston Press). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from Shenandoah and The Massachusetts Review to storySouth, and Notre Dame Review.
She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University. She also offers instruction on the art and craft of writing at the Lafayette Writers’ Studio.
Fraterrigo will read from her memoir, “The Perils of Girlhood.”
Like many girls growing up in the eighties and nineties, Melissa Fraterrigo leaned on popular culture to transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Judy Blume told stories about girls embracing their imperfections, and Madonna encouraged bold moves. But Fraterrigo’s experiences with dating and attempts to refashion her body through diet and exercise left her feeling far from empowered.
It wasn’t until Fraterrigo became a mother to twin daughters and they began their own self-criticisms that she questioned how she might help them navigate their own girlhoods.
A handsome swim coach’s advances, an anxious daughter soothes her father’s temper, the history of Mace, and a college student’s frightening harassment are some of the memories that shape Fraterrigo’s worldview as an adult. “The Perils of Girlhood” shows how the subconscious messages that wrought a generation played out in one life and also celebrates the friendships that make every stage of the journey worthwhile. Written with lyricism and insight, these personal narratives provide a reckoning and a reclamation. And while they developed from Fraterrigo’s desire to guide her daughters, they speak universal truths that compel us to consider how best to bring all of our daughters into the future.
Afsheen Farhadi
Fiction Reading
Thursday, November 5, 2026, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
UIndy Hall, Schwitzer Student Center
Photo courtesy of the author.
Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of the novel “FALSE PROPHET.” His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Farhadi will read from his book, “FALSE PROPHET,” in which a grieving actor-turned-memoirist reimagines his mother’s encounter with Jim Jones, the deadliest cult leader of all time—the only problem is, it’s mostly all lies.
Actor Jal Persad is enjoying moderate success when the death of his mother, Rita, sends him into a tailspin—after all, how could he grieve a woman he barely knew? Rita had grown up in Guyana during the rise and fall of the Jonestown cult, but never spoke of her home to Jal, always keeping him at a distance.
After months of avoiding work, a misunderstanding at lunch with his manager leads Jal into a web of lies. He soon finds himself writing a memoir of his mother’s adolescence, one that places her in direct contact with Jim Jones himself. There’s just one issue–Rita never met the man. Suddenly, the book goes viral, and Jal must face the looming threat of exposure and his own guilt.
Alternating between Jal’s rapid rise and Rita’s distorted story, “FALSE PROPHET” confronts the intergenerational legacy of colonialism, the allure of power, and the age-old question–how much of yourself are you willing to lose in order to succeed?
C. Russell Price
Poetry Reading
Wednesday, February 24, 2027, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
UIndy Hall, Schwitzer Student Center
Photo Credit: Joshua Tatro
C. Russell Price is the author of “oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems.” They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and work with the Anarchist Review of Books. They are a Lambda Fellow, a Ragdale Fellow, and a two-time Lit 50 honoree. Price landscapes in Chicago.
Price will read from “Bizquick: An American Seance,” a breathtaking gallop through spectral planes, grief, and ghosts.
Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In “Bisquick: An American Seance,” Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?
Bernardo Wade
Poetry Reading
Tuesday, April 6, 2027, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
UIndy Hall, Schwitzer Student Center
Photo courtesy of the author.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade tries at poems, catches elbows on the court, wanders around the Bay—occasionally on Stanford’s campus as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Previously the Editor of Indiana Review, he now serves as Assistant Editor and Poetry Editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and, though he’s published in a bunch of literary journals no one in his family has ever heard of, they remain proud of him, especially when they are featured in the poems.
His first full-length poetry collection, “A Love Tap,” was recently published by Lookout Books of UNC-Wilmington. He’s infatuated with Ed Roberson’s question, “Can you O.D. on life?”
Awarded the 2021 Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, the 2023 Third Coast Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets’ Vera Strube Poetry Prize, he has words in The Nation, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.
Wade will read from “A Love Tap”, a silver winner of the Foreword INDIE in Poetry.
Wade’s “A Love Tap”—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.
Learn more about the Kellogg Writers Series at the University of Indianapolis.