Writers Series presents Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Robin Hemley, Trudy Lewis, and Okey Ndibe
St. Lawrence University Writers Series. Celebrating 25 years of the Viebranz Visiting Professorship. Welcome back Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Robin Hemley, Trudy Lewis, and Okey Ndibe for a writers craft talk and reading. Writers Series events are free and open to the public.
Thursday, October 9, 2025
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Writers Craft Talk, Carnegie 10, 11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
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Reading, Sykes Common Room, 8 p.m.
About the Authors
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include: Art Above Everything, All the Agents and Saints, Mexican Enough, and Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Since serving as the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in 2012-2013, she has been Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has also performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.
Learn more about Stephanie at her website.
Robin Hemley
Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book, a memoir in essays, is How to Change History: A Salvage Project. Other books include the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography, and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood. He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold more than hundred thousand copies over thirty years. He is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellow and has received The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, and Pushcart Prizes in nonfiction and fiction. Hemley is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW, and inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore. A graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he served for 9 years as director of the university’s Nonfiction Writing Program. He is now Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa, and The Digital Storytelling Lab there was recently dedicated in his honor.
Learn more about Robin at his website.
Trudy Lewis
Trudy Lewis is the author of the novels The Empire Rolls (Moon City Press) and Private Correspondences (William Goyen Prize from Northwestern/TriQuarterly) in addition to a story collection, The Bones of Garbo, winner of the Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction from The Ohio State University Press. Trudy’s fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, New England Review, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Witness, and others. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Norton Island, and the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania. Trudy is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
Okey Ndibe
Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction), and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has taught at various universities and colleges, including Brown, St. Lawrence, Trinity College, Connecticut College, University of Massachusetts, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). His award-winning journalism has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the UK, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US—where he served on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant.
Learn more about Okey at his website.