Speakers and Presenters
We are excited to announce our featured presenters for the next festival (Feb. 2025).
Dana Gioia
Keynote Speaker
Dana Gioia s a celebrated poet and critic. Gioia (pronounced “joy-a”) has published five full-length collections of verse, most recently Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). His collection 99 poems won the Poets’ Prize as the best new book of the year.
Former California Poet Laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is best known as a central figure in the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. In addition to the American Book Award and Poets’ Prize, Gioia has won many awards including the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, Presidential Citizen’s Medal, Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and Walt Whitman Champion of Literacy prize. He has been awarded ten honorary doctorates. Critic William Oxley has called Dana, “probably the most exquisite poet writing in English today.” Gioia has written four opera libretti and collaborated with musicians in genres from classical to jazz. His most recent critical book is The Catholic Writer Today: and Other Essays (2019).
Daniel Bowman Jr.
Keynote Speaker
Daniel Bowman Jr is the author of A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country: Poems (VAC Chicago, 2012), the memoir On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, & the Gifts of Neurodiversity (Brazos, 2021), and the forthcoming graphic novel The Autism Journals (Oni Press). His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Books & Culture, The Midwest Quarterly, Rio Grande Review, Seneca Review, St. Katherine Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and other magazines.
He grew up in New York and lives in Indiana, where he is Associate Professor of English at Taylor University, Editor in Chief of Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and faculty advisor to Students for Education on Neurodiversity (SEND).
Katy Karl
Keynote Speaker
Katy Carl is the author of As Earth Without Water (Wiseblood Books, 2021) and of Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021) and is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Windhover, Vita Poetica, Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Evangelization & Culture, Genealogies of Modernity, and the National Catholic Register, among others.
A senior affiliate fellow of Penn’s Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, Katy is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She was honored to be the inaugural Wiseblood Books Writer in Residence in 2020.
Page last updated July 16, 2024