RUINING THE NARRATIVE: Women as Witness and Agents of Story

Three extraordinary writers will discuss the ways their work disrupts and brightens narratives of gender and truth, "ruining" longheld narratives that have silenced and diminished their voices as women and artists.

More about each panelist:

Dawn Burns is the author of A Green Glow on the Horizon and Evangelina Everyday. and founder and co-organizer of the SwampFire community of writers and artists. While thoroughly Midwestern, Dawn also loves to travel and is relentlessly curiousabout people and places. Dawn’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest,and in On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes.

A recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council, and an assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and community building as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond their classroom.

Melissa Fraterrigo’s memoir, The Perils of Girlhood was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2025. She is also the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press), and the story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). She teaches creative writing at Purdue University, in the Butler University MFA in Creative Writing program, and is the founder of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana. Please visit melissafraterrigo.com and lafayettewritersstudio.com.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of The Waters (W.W. Norton, 2024) written “with a ‘ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world’ . Her bestselling novel, Once Upon a River (2011) was adapted into a full length feature film and released to international critical acclaim in 2020.

She is also author of Q Road, and her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

Her story collection American Salvage, a National Book Award Finalist, was heralded by The Guardian as a top 10 rural noir novel of all time.

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