UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Milk Route 2026
MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art. Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
C. “Meaks” Meaker
C. “Meaks” Meaker is a writer and teacher whose work often explores queerness, monstrosity, and the end of the world. Their plays have been performed and developed across the United States, including the Kennedy Center, Seattle Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, Annex Theatre in Seattle, and About Face in Chicago. They are a Stranger Award Genius Nominee and Gregory Award Outstanding New Play Nominee. They are a former Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center, an alumna of Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Writers Group, and former Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Their essay “S(wallow)” won the Editor’s Prize at Porter House Review and they have other publications in under the gum tree and West Trade Review. They were a Creative Nonfiction Fellow at Lambda Literary and received an MFA in Playwriting from University of Iowa’s Playwrights’ Workshop. They teach classes at the Playwrights’ Center and City College of New York while dramaturging plays about monsters and managing every possible outdoor venue in New York.
Metz Writer in Residence
Caxton Club Reading
Red Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 22 May, 4-5 p.m.
Born in Chicago, Peter Orner is the author of seven acclaimed books including Maggie Brown & Others, Love and Shame and Love,Esther Stories, finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award, and Am I Alone Here?, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is his latest novel, just out from Little Brown. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Stories, and been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. A former Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Orner is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Vermont, where he’s also a volunteer firefighter.
The Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 30 January, 2026, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
The Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 13 February, 2026, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art. Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
Caxton Club Reading &
Davenport Prizes in CNF & Playwriting
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, 27 March, 4-5 p.m.
Department Mixer & Open Mic
Keiner Letterpress Studio
Friday, 10 April, 7 p.m.
Come find out what we do in the English Department. While you’re here, you could share a poem, part of a story, essay, or play. You could sing a song, dance, do a magic trick. (Anything PG-13 in 3 minutes or less.) You could also meet wonderfully strange and talented people, get some good food, and maybe walk away with an original print off of one of our platen presses…
Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!—a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—and two books of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance.
Kaveh is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and elsewhere, and has been awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and named one of the TIME 100 Next.
Kaveh's writing appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Paris Review, New Republic, GQ, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Best American Sportswriting, and elsewhere. He was the founding editor of Divedapper, and since 2020, has served as poetry editor for The Nation. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh is the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Eileen G’Sell
Caxton Club Reading
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, 20 February , 4-5 p.m.
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press. Her second book of poetry, Francofilaments, was published in 2024 by Broken Sleep Books. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, joins Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series in early 2026.
G’Sell’s poetry has been published in Poetry magazine, Fence, and The Boston Review; her essays have been published in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, and Jacobin. She serves as movie critic for The Hopkins Review and frequently reviews film and art for Hyperallergic and Reverse Shot. In 2023, she won the Rabkin Prize for excellence in arts writing. G’Sell teaches writing and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Milk Route 2026
Senior Symposium
302 Alumni Hall
Tuesday 3 March, 2026, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
SENIOR SYMPOSIUM gives Literature Majors the opportunity to synthesize the skills and information acquired as an English major. The course will have a different theme each year. Recent themes include “Adaptation,” “Irony,” “Noir,” “Homeless in the Waste Land,” “On the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” “The Literary Vampire,” “Animal Gothic,” “Visions and Revisions: Three Victorian Novels and Their (Post)modern Reworkings,” “Pulp,” “The Uncanny,” “Trauma and Visuality,” "Bodies on Display," “Hauntology,” "Whiteness in Literature," and “Bodies.”
During the first part of the term, students will read and interpret texts much as they would for any upper-level English class. The second part of the term focuses on the Symposium—an opportunity for them to present their ideas to the entire department. The exact format of the Symposium varies from year to year. Students in the course not only present their work, but organize, publicize, and run Symposium. At the end of the term, students compose an article-length piece of literary criticism—an extension and revision of their Symposium presentation—which responds to current scholarship and presents an original argument. This year’s theme is “In Between.”
Phillip Shabazz
Caxton Club Reading &
Davenport Prizes in Poetry
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, 3 April, 4-5 p.m.
Phillip Shabazz is a poet, writer, and educator whose work bridges the worlds of youth mentorship, social justice, and the arts. Widely praised by educators as “one of the most inspiring individuals in the arts,” he has served as a poet-in-the-schools across North Carolina and conducted creative writing workshops in over 800 schools, conferences, and community centers. Currently affiliated with the North Carolina Arts Council, Shabazz has been a visiting writer at numerous colleges and institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill, Elon University, East Carolina University, Barton College, Warren Wilson College, and Appalachian State University. He was also Duke University’s third Artist-in-Residence at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. Shabazz is the author of four poetry collections, including Moonflower (new), Flames in the Fire: Poems and When the Grass Was Blue: A Novel in Verse. His poetry has been nominated for Best of Net, and has appeared in the anthologies Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State's Most Celebrated Playwright, Home Is Where: African American Poetry from the Carolinas, Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, and Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont: A Guidebook. His work has also been published in literary journals such as Florida Review, Galway Review, Sky Island Journal, Queen’s Quarterly, Thimble, Hamilton Stone Review, Fine Lines, Mason Street Journal, Hamline Lit, K'in, BREATHE, and New Critique.
Kaveh Akbar
Peter Orner
Caxton Club Reading
The Red Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 3 October, 4-5 p.m.
Photo credit: Riel Sturchio