Award-winning author Dr. Donika Kelly will be this year’s featured speaker at the Dr. Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture Series at Southern Arkansas University. The lecture will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, February 13, 2023, in Wilson 216, on SAU’s campus.
Dr. Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Dr. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.
A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Dr. Kelly has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Kelly currently resides in Iowa City.
Dr. Kathleen Mallory served as a professor of English at SAU from 1974 until her retirement in 2010. The mission of the Dr. Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture Series is to honor Dr. Mallory’s many contributions to SAU, the community, and the state of Arkansas. This is done by bringing scholars working in the fields of African Diasporic and African American Studies to SAU to share their scholarship with students, faculty, staff, and members of the community.
The Dr. Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture is free and open to the public. For more information on the lecture series at SAU, please contact Dr. Linda Tucker in the Department of Modern Languages at (870) 235-4210.
