Visiting Writer Seminar to Welcome Author Diane Glancy March 3-4

OBU will welcome renowned author Diane Glancy to campus for the annual Visiting Writer Seminars. The event will be held in-person March 3-4, 2021, on the University’s campus in Shawnee.

The opportunity to hear from and talk with important contemporary writers has been a vital part of an OBU education for many years. Beginning in 2010, the English Department Reading Series brought writers to campus, focusing on writers living in the area. The Visiting Writer Seminars then began as a way to make the reading series more ambitious and to widen its appeal by seeking to elevate the experience for students and the campus community.

The University’s first visiting writer, Tania Runyan, came to campus in March 2016. She read from her poems, lectured on writing poetry and consulted with students about their writing. Scott Cairns joined the University for the 2017 Visiting Writer Seminar, giving a poetry reading and teaching a master class on writing memoir. Gina Ochsner held a reading and a fiction writing master class in the Fall of 2017. Mark Jarman came to campus in September 2018 as the Visiting Writer and keynote speaker for the Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature. Ron Hansen discussed writing and creativity in October 2019.

This year’s seminar dovetails with OBU’s first Lamppost Literary Conference March 5. The Lamppost Literary Conference aims to attract students, parents and teachers from Christian and classical schools, as well as home school communities, to discuss the cultivation of creativity in young minds.

Diane Glancy is a renowned author of Cherokee descent, gifted in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. She is also a professor emerita at Macalester College in Minnesota. Her 2020 poetry collection “Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job” (Turtle Point Press) was listed as New and Noteworthy in the New York Times. Forthcoming in 2021 are “A Line of Driftwood: A Story of Ada Blackjack” (Turtle Point) and “Still Moving: How the Road, the Land and the Sacred Shape a Life” (Broadleaf Books, Fortress Press). In 2020, Glancy received a Creative Artist Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society where she worked on a new collection, “Quadrille, the Intersection of Christianity and the Native American.”

Glancy’s work often reflects her Native American heritage. Part Cherokee, and of English and German descent, she was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Glancy has served as artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma State Arts Council, traveling around the state to teach poetry to Native American students, and has taught Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Reviewers have noted Glancy’s ability to combine genres, to portray both Native American and non-Native characters, and to depict Native American beliefs and Christianity in her writing. Adept at writing free verse as well as prose poems, she often portrays the intersections of new and old worlds, reporting on history, religion and the loss of Native traditions. Glancy has explored Native American history in depth in her novels “Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears” (1996) and “Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea” (2003).

Glancy’s collection of poems, “Primer of the Obsolete,” won the 2003 Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has also received the Five Civilized Tribes Playwriting Laureate Prize; the Oklahoma Book Award; the Cherokee Medal of Honor, Cherokee Honor Society, Tahlequah, Oklahoma; the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry; grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship.

Find out more about the Visiting Writer Seminars.

Learn more about the Lamppost Literary Conference.