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Creative voices
Writers share experiences during residency

Four alumni writers returned to campus Nov. 3 through 6 for the Wittenberg Series’ “Distinguished Alumni Fellows Residency.”

The writers included Joshua D. Dean, ’95, Joyce Coyne Dyer, ’69, Terry (Terrence A.) Hermsen, ’72, and Martin D. Lammon, ’80.

This first-of-its-kind alumni writers’ residency served to celebrate some of the ways Wittenberg graduates exemplify creativity and learning.

“Our theme for the Wittenberg Series this year is ‘Wittenberg and Beyond: Creative Voices, Defining Lives,’ and we felt really strongly that all of these people are exemplars in this theme,” said Gwen Scheffel, Wittenberg Series coordinator.

Dean serves as the entertainment editor at Twist, a national magazine for teenagers, and was founding editor of Pulp, a New Jersey-based newspaper for teenagers. Dyer is the director of writing and an associate professor of English at Hiram College.

She won the 1997 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council and is the author of In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey.

Hermsen is a well-known poet-in-residence in programs supported by the Ohio Arts Council and the author of 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems.

Lammon holds the Callaway/Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University. He is the author of News from Where I Live: Poems and editor of Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry.

Throughout the week, the four shared their experiences, detailed their career paths, directed workshops, conducted in-class sessions and critiqued students’ writing.

“I was impressed by the high quality of attention they gave to the students,” said Professor of English Imogene Bolls, who knows each of these writers personally.

“They have given the students a direction for their lives,” she said, adding that “our students were really turned on by them.”