Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Awards, and the Publishing Triangle Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center, Kellys poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa.
Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, also a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2025. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell, among others, Feboss work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The Believer, and Best American Essays. She is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
The public reading and book signing will occur at 7:30 PM in the Rutgers Student Center. Rutgers students, faculty, and staff are also invited to attend a Q&A at 4:00 PM with the authors in Murray Hall, room 302 (third floor).