The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series: Heather Sellers and Anna Gazmarian

The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is a student-run and faculty-organized series committed to hosting 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 September 30th in the BSC’s Schaap Auditorium, the series hosted writers Heather Sellers and Anna Gazmarian. 

Heather Sellers is an award-winning writer and professor who has taught writing workshops for the past twenty years. Sellers was the director of the creative writing program at Hope College and taught at Hope for eighteen years. Currently, she is the director of the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where in 2017 she was awarded a university teaching award. She was given USF’s Kosove Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Service in 2022. Sellers’ popular textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, is in its fourth edition, following two books on craft, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter. Her textbook is used by Hope students today. Sellers has published numerous books, a collection of linked short stories and a memoir. She recently published her fourth volume of poetry, Field Notes from the Flood Zone, which reflects on the disappearing Florida coast as rising waters and development reshape the landscape. During a year of daily observations, Sellers mourns the loss of nature while witnessing the uncertain future of her coastal town. This collection is a love letter to Florida’s fragile beauty and a meditation on individual and collective loss. In her session for the series, Sellers talks about her newest poetry book, and how it is a love letter to her students. Sellers read some poems of hers which were about her past students and how she’s learned from and with them. 

Anna Gazmarian holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Guardian, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun Magazine and Quarterly West. She currently works for The Sun Magazine. Gazmarian published “Devout: A Memoir of Doubt” in March 2024. She shares the journey of her bipolar disorder diagnosis with her Evangelical upbringing in North Carolina. Diagnosed in 2011, Gazmarian faces a community that views her condition as a spiritual affliction rather than a medical issue. Over the next decade, she challenges this belief, seeking proper treatment and a deeper understanding of her faith. This memoir connects the gap between science and spirituality, offering a powerful narrative on how mental, emotional and spiritual well-being are interconnected. Gazmarian believes that faith and medicine can coexist. During her reading for the series, Gazmarian challenges us to see our lives as extensions of the Gospel. She reflected on how she lost her sense of self after her bipolar disorder, and how poetry has given her a way of living through losses. Gazmarian then touched on her rocky relationship with faith. She states that she felt like she had failed as a Christian because she was so unsure. Gazmarian then went to church and wrote a poem about it as a sense of redemption. That’s when she realized that writing was her preferred way of praying. She claimed she no longer sought other ways of distraction from life. In her moments of greatest clarity, she knew that God was there for her.

To learn more about the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series and future events, you can go to the Hope College website. The next Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series event will be with Jack Ridl and Chris Dombrowski in the Jim and Martie Bultman Student Center, Schaap Auditorium on November 13th at 7:00 pm.

(Featured image source: Jack Ridl Visiting Writer Series Facebook page)