CHAD SIMPSON                                 

5 p.m. Thursday, February 28
Traditions Lounge, Second Floor in University Center East

Chad Simpson is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. His short story collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi, was published by the University of Iowa Press in October 2012. Simpson was raised in Monmouth, Illinois, and Logansport, Indiana. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's, The Sun, Esquire, Barrelhouse, American Short Fiction, and many other print and online publications. He also is the author of a chapbook of short fiction, Phantoms, published by Origami Zoo Press in 2010. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in prose, he teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he received the Philip Green Wright/Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching in 2010. He lives in Monmouth, Illinois, with his wife, Jane.

CHLOE CALDWELL                                  

5 p.m. Thursday, March 21

Traditions Lounge, Second Floor in University Center East

Chloe Caldwell is the author of the essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Chronogram, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH Magazine, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction, and The Faster Times. She is the founder and curator of the Hudson River Loft Reading Series and has taught Creative Writing workshops at Omega Teen Camp, The Hudson Opera House, and Crow Arts Manor. Caldwell splits her time living in upstate New York and Portland, Oregon.

DONALD RAY POLLOCK
5 p.m. Thursday, April 18

Traditions Lounge, Second Floor in University Center East

Donald Ray Pollock was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio, in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. He graduated from the MFA program at Ohio State University in 2009, and still lives in Chillicothe with his wife, Patsy. His first book, Knockemstiff, won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Third Coast, The Journal, and Sou’wester. The Devil All the Time is his first novel.