"Influence and Inspiration": A panel discussion

Four prominent writers discuss the various forces that have helped to generate and shape their work. Public parking is available in the Woodside Garage beneath Langsam Library on the Uptown Campus, or along Martin Luther King Drive on the north edge of the Uptown campus.

Lydi Conklin's story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK. Conklin has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago, and has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and was longlisted for the New American Voices Award and the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of National Bestseller The American Daughters, published by One World Random House. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize, and We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper's, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, and he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Host or Publisher University of Cincinnati English Department