The WKU English department will be hosting the upcoming Creative Writing Reading Series, which will showcase writers of various genres and their works to the student body.

The guest speakers include William Akers, a screenwriter who taught filmmaking and screenwriting at Vanderbilt University; Erin Keane, a memoir writer who wrote one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022, “Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Be” and Erin Slaughter, an alumna from the MFA program at the WKU English department.

David Bell, a professor of English and the interim director of the MFA program, helped organize the event and invited the guests to speak.

“Usually we either bring in writers we know in some capacity, or writers whose work we’ve come across and we think they’re interesting and our students would benefit from hearing from them,” Bell said. “Like anything at a university like this, we have a budget, so we can’t pay many thousands of dollars to bring people here. […] We just try to bring people who will be beneficial to the students.”

Akers will speak on Monday, Feb. 6, Keane will speak on Wednesday, March 29 and Slaughter will speak on Thursday, April 13, all in Cherry Hall 125 at 7 p.m. on each respective day. Attendance is free and open to the public.

“My goal for the events is to have students learn something about writing […] and to come away inspired,” Bell said.

Akers’s work can be found at keytostorytelling.com, and Slaughter’s work can be found at erin-slaughter.com.

“I also hope that students understand that writers are real people,” Bell said. “They’re not living far away, distant from us. They’re people who can come to our campus, they can get to talk to them, they can get to see what the life of a writer is like; I hope students are able to see the work the writers do when they’re here as something they could potentially be doing someday, if they’re fortunate enough to make a career as a writer.”

Reporter Damon Stone can be contacted at [email protected].