The VCU Visiting Writers Series hosts a joint-reading by acclaimed authors Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly . . . 

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, The Black Mountain Institute, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, will be published on June 3, 2025. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Donika is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Her poems have been published 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, where she teaches creative writing.