MWC Welcomes Award-Winning Writers Ben Miller and Anne Pierson Wiese for Two-Day Mini-Residency, July 27 – 28

The Midwest Writing Center is thrilled to welcome award-winning writers Ben Miller and Anne Pierson Wiese for an exciting two-day mini-residency, July 27 – 28.

First, MWC will host a Community Conversation Brown Bag event at noon on July 27 at the Rock Island Public Library Downtown Branch. The event will feature memoirist and Davenport native Ben Miller, and award-winning poet Ann Pierson Wiese, who will talk about their work, their life together in writing, and why they believe writing is important. Event is free & open.

Then, later that night, they will read at the SPECTRA Reading Series at Rozz-Tox, with Great River Writers Retreat winner Dee Robb and interns & staff from this year’s Young Emerging Writers Program. The event will start at 6pm with a social hour, followed by a feature reading from Miller, Wiese, and Robb at 7pm, followed by a special YEW showcase starting at 8pm. Event is free & open, but space is limited.

Both of these events will be livestreamed to MWC’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/midwestwritingcenter

Finally, MWC is extending a special invitation to attend a Legacy Luncheon at the Holiday Inn in Rock Island on Friday, July 28 at noon, featuring remarks Ben Miller. The event intends to encourage support of the Midwest Writing Center, and specifically its Legacy Society. The lunch is complimentary, but space is limited, and reservations are required.

The lunch is complimentary, but space is limited, and reservations are required. Please contact MWC Board Member Susan Collins to reserve a seat: susancollins2520@gmail.com

Check out this video of Ben Miller talking about how he got started with MWC, and join these terrific writers for an inspiring two days of events…

Award-winning author and Davenport native Ben Miller talks about the early imaginings of the Midwest Writing Center, co-founder David R. Collins, and why a place like MWC is important to the Quad Cities community and beyond before giving the keynote address at the 2019 David R. Collins Writers’ Conference at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA, June 27, 2019. Video shot by Jeff Moore.

Ben Miller is the author of the forthcoming Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press) and River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (University of North Carolina Press). His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Anne Pierson Wiese‘s first poetry collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press) received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, Which Way Was North, is forthcoming in 2023 (Louisiana State University Press). She has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship, fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the South Dakota Arts Council, and a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize.

These events are supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Illinois Humanities, the Hubbell-Waterman Foundation, the MWC Legacy Society, the Rock Island Public Library, and Rozz-Tox.