The English department will host two writers on campus in the first week of November.
As part of the Visiting Writers Series, Kansas Poet Laureate Traci Brimhall will speak and read from her work on Nov. 2, and award-winning short story writer and Bethel graduate Jennifer Sears will give a guest workshop on Nov. 5 and a public reading on Nov. 6.
The two are coming to Bethel largely due to funding from the Tina Block Ediger English Department Endowment.
Brimhall – who visited Bethel in January for the annual Celebrate Kansas Day! event at Kauffman Museum – will give a convocation entitled “Second Chances & Mistakes – What Poetry Teaches Us About Starting Over.”
Convocation is at 11 a.m. in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center.
After convocation, Brimhall will remain in the auditorium from 12-12:50 p.m. for a special class session of Dr. Siobhán Scarry’s course Introduction to Literature.
The class will discuss a small packet of Brimhall’s poems. Along with convocation, this event is open to the public, and extra packets will be available for those joining the discussion.
At the end of the week, Jennifer Sears, Brooklyn, N.Y., will read from her 2026 collection of short stories, What Mennonite Girls Are Good For.
Sears graduated from Bethel in 1991. What Mennonite Girls Are Good For won the 2025 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press.
While on campus, Sears will teach a guest workshop for Scarry’s fiction-writing class. On Nov. 7, she will give a public reading at 7 p.m. in the Administration Building chapel.
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University and the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, 2024).
Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Orion, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Museum and the Purdue University Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart.
Jennifer Sears is professor of English and creative writing and the 2026 Scholar on Campus at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York.
She has a B.A. in English from Bethel, where she studied with Raylene Hinz-Penner, Anna Juhnke and John Sherriff. She also earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Her stories and essays have been cited in Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. What Mennonite Girls Are Good For also won the 2024 NeMLA Fiction Book Award.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel was the only Kansas college or university selected for the American Association of College & Universities’ 2021 Institute on Truth, Community Healing and Transformation, and has been named a TCHT Campus Center. Visit the Bethel website for more information.
