Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series: Ling Ma

Ling Ma comes to Shelton Auditorium on Monday, November 9, as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. Ma is a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for fiction, and this is her first time appearing in Indianapolis as part of the series.

If you're not already familiar with her work, her debut novel Severance (2018) is the one that put her on the map. It won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and has since been translated into seven languages. Her most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories (2022). Ma was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah and Kansas; she earned her MFA from Cornell University and has taught creative writing and English at both Cornell and the University of Chicago. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, and the Chicago Reader.

It helps to know the company she's in. The Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series has brought authors like Toni Morrison, Billy Collins, Kurt Vonnegut, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Olds, Amy Tan, and Colson Whitehead to Indianapolis over nearly 40 years. Coordinated by the Department of English, it's one of the largest and most comprehensive series of its kind in the country.

The event is at Shelton Auditorium in Butler University's Midtown Arts District, starting at 7:30 PM. It's free and open to the public, and no ticket is required.