Writers Reading: Andrea Lawlor, with Dan Bevacqua, Julie Choffel, and Henk Rossouw

Presented in partnership with the Amherst Business Improvement District, Writers Reading is a curated series featuring local authors. In our next installment of the reading series, join us for a line-up curated by featured writer Andrea Lawlor. Fellow writers, Dan Bevacqua, Julie Choffel, and Henk Rossouw, will join Lawlor in sharing selections from their work.

This event is free to attend and open to all. Books will be available for purchase. See author bios below.

Andrea Lawlor is the author of two chapbooks, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and Position Papers (Belladonna*, 2024), as well as a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017; Vintage, 2019; Picador UK, 2019). Their stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, and The New York Times. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction and the Prix Sade, as well as fellowships from Lambda Literary, Radar Labs, the Ucross Foundation, and Macdowell. They are an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Mount Holyoke College, and live in Western Massachusetts.

Dan Bevacqua is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Western New England University. He is the author of the novel Molly Bit (Simon & Schuster). His short stories have appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The Best American Mystery Stories, the New Orleans Review, the Literary Review, and the Paris Review. He lives in North Amherst with his wife, the poet Hannah Brooks-Motl.

Julie Choffel is the author of Dear Wallace (The Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press, 2024), The Hello Delay (Fordham UP, 2012), and a handful of chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Orion, Conduit, New American Writing, and the tiny. Originally from Texas, she teaches at the University of Connecticut and lives near Hartford with her partner and their three children.

Henk Rossouw's debut Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018) won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in the 2018 box set New-Generation African Poets. His poems have been in POETRY, Boston Review, and The Paris Review, among other places. From 2018 to 2025, he taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he co-directed the Creative Writing Program and received early tenure. Originally from South Africa, he lives in Western Massachusetts.