Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series: Meet Ananda Lima and Roger Reeves 

The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series has concluded another successful semester. The student-run and faculty-organized series hosts free public events showcasing writers. Each event offers local and student communities opportunities to interact with the visiting writers and discuss their work through panels, readings, classes and workshops. On April 1st in the BSC’s Schaap Auditorium, the series hosted Ananda Lima and Roger Reeves. 

Ananda Lima is a poet and fiction writer. Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review and Electric Literature. Soon, her work will be featured in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors. Lima is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio in Chicago. She was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow. Her academic achievements include an MA in Linguistics at UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University Newark. Lima’s fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In the book, Lima explores the modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences of ambition, fear, longing and belonging. During her time at the event, she read excerpts from Craft and gave light to some of her reasoning and thought processes when writing the book. 

Roger Reeves is an American poet and essayist. Reeves is a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize. His book Dark Days: Fugitive Essays was a finalist for the Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism in 2024. Reeves’ debut collection, King Me, was a Library Journal Best Poetry pick and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Reeves has had many poems and essays published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Yale Review and Granta. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2008 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Currently, Reeves is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas, Austin. For the Writers Series, Reeves shared an excerpt from his book Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, a nonfiction book about finding new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy

If you want to learn more about the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series and future events, visit their page on the Hope College website. The Series is done for this school year; however, there’s a list of past presenters on the site for those interested in the many writers who have come through to share their stories. 

(Featured image source: Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Instagram page)