VISITING WRITERS SERIES: Alexandra Teague, Michael McGriff, and Thomas Dai

Join us Tuesday, October 14th for the WSU Department of English Visiting Writers Series!

VISITING WRITERS SERIES: WSU Department of English Welcomes Thomas Dai, Michael McGriff, and Alexandra Teague from the University of Idaho
5:30pm–7:00pm, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU

Join us for the WSU Department of English Visiting Writers Series! Every year VWS brings noted poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction to campus for readings, class visits, workshops, and collaborative exchanges across intellectual and artistic disciplines. This October we welcome creative writing faculty from the nearby University of Idaho to share recent writings and experiences.

Thomas Dai is the author of Take My Name but Say It Slow (W. W. Norton, 2025), a collection of essays interrogating travel, place, Asian American identity, and other imperfect means of mapping the self. He primarily teaches courses on creative nonfiction, especially the essay in all its many forms, but is also interested in autofiction, science and nature writing, and writing that integrates visual media. With a background in both creative and critical writing practices, Thomas’s more recent work interweaves creative nonfiction with more scholarly writing to think about the intersections of race, queerness, and ecology.

Michael McGriff is an author, editor, and translator. He is the co-author, with J. M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014 and featured on Weekend Edition Sunday. His poetry collections include Inquest, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Black Postcards, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills.

Alexandra Teague is the author of three books of poetry: Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), The Wise and Foolish Builders(Persea, 2015), and Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010). She is also the author of the novel The Principles Behind Flotation (Skyhorse, 2017) and a memoir in essays, Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir (Oregon State University Press, 2023). Her work has been praised in such publications as Booklist, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times as “a strong feminist penman to watch,” “formally impressive,” and “passionate, quirky, and righteously outraged.”

Image | Alexandra Teague, Michael McGriff, and Thomas Dai