The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is honored to welcome back Anna Gazmarian ’14 and Heather Sellers, former Hope professor, for the nineteenth annual Tom Andrews Memorial Reading on September 30, at 7 p.m., in the Bultman Student Center's Schaap Auditorium. A Q&A will follow the reading and both authors will be available to sign books. 

Anna Gazmarian graduated from Hope College and holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, Longreads,The Sun, and The Guardian. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. 

Devout, her first book, follows Gazmarian's journey as a college student recently diagnosed with bipolar and seeking to find solace and support in the only community, and belief system, she had ever known as a devout Christian of Evangelical faith. At turns harrowing, humorous, and humble in her approach, Anna asks: “How can we learn to recover from what seems unrecoverable? How do we live with life-altering events, such as receiving a severe mental health diagnosis? How do we keep going when hope seems lost?” Devout proves that, in a society that pits our devotion to a higher power against a belief in medicine, we need strong narratives that show how our pursuit of mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being is all governed by faith; that fear of falling short in our faith makes us human; and that, sometimes, being human is all that God asks of us.

Heather Sellers, a Florida native, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Field Notes from the Flood Zone, a book of prose poems sprung from her daily observation journals and haunted by ghosts from the past. It is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.

Sellers is also the author of two textbooks and two books on craft, as well as a children's book, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know. Recent essays have been selected for the Best American Essays and awarded a Pushcart Prize; these essays appear in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Sun, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She regularly speaks to audiences about prosopagnosia (face blindness), most recently at NASA. Sellers taught for many years at Hope College where she was a H.O.P.E Professor of the Year. Currently she is director of the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where she was awarded a university teaching award and more recently given USF’s Kosove Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Service.