The Wells College Visiting Writers Series will welcome Amy Butcher for a reading of her work at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 20, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. Admission is free and all are welcome. Butcher will also hold a writing master class at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, February 21, in Main Building’s Faculty Parlors.
Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of a memoir, Visiting Hours, which earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Most recently, her work was featured on National Public Radio and BBC, awarded grand prize in the 2016 Solas Awards’ “Best of Travel Writing” series, selected for inclusion in Best Travel Writing 2016, earned notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, and 2017 editions of the Best American Essays series, and awarded grand prize in the 2014 Iowa Review Award in nonfiction as judged by David Shields.
Her 2016 op-ed, “Emoji Feminism,” published in the New York Times Sunday Review, was cited by Google as the inspiration for eleven new professional female-empowered emojis, accepted by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in July 2016 and incorporated in January 2017 in all iOS software packaging internationally.
Additional essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times “Modern Love,” The New York Times SundayReview, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, The Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, The Paris Review online, Tin House online, and Brevity, among others. Her work has additionally been anthologized in The Best Travel Writing 2016, The Soul Of A Great Traveler, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, The Best Of Vela, and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays.
The Visiting Writers Series presents four to five events each semester featuring authors who have distinguished themselves in poetry, fiction, nonfiction or drama. These writers not only give public readings of their work; they also conduct writing workshops, participate in classes and discussions and often hold individual conferences with interested student writers. The Visiting Writers Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
