Wabash College is pleased to welcome award-winning poet Michael Kleber-Diggs to campus as part of the President’s Distinguished Speaker Series. He will spend two days at Wabash and will read from his published work at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21, in the Lovell Lecture Room in Baxter Hall (room 101).
The event is free and open to the public.
Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, arts educator, and podcast host. He is the author of Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2021), which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, the 2021 Poetry Center Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award.
In the poems of Worldly Things, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love couple with moments of wrenching grief. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better.
His second book, My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated but enduring love of lap swimming, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2028.
His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent.
Kleber-Diggs teaches creative writing through the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, at Hamline University, and at universities throughout the Twin Cities. He also co-hosts, with Erin Sharkey, the popular nature-writing podcast Into a Darker Wilderness.
Kleber-Diggs will also meet with English department faculty and students and attend three classes during his visit to Crawfordsville. His public reading is generously sponsored by the President’s Distinguished Speaker Series.