Northwestern’s Visiting Writer Series set for April 6

March 30, 2026

Dr. Constance Squires, author and creative writing professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, photographed in a professional portrait. She has long, wavy auburn hair and is wearing a sleeveless dark purple top. She is smiling and looking slightly off-camera to her left, posed against a blurred two-tone background of gray and dark blue.

ALVA, Okla. — The Northwestern Oklahoma State University Department of English, Foreign Language and Humanities will play host to author Dr. Constance Squires for the annual Visiting Writer Series.

The event will be Monday, April 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Student Center Ranger Room on the Northwestern-Alva campus. The Visiting Writer Series presentation is open to students, faculty, staff and the general public.

Dr. David Vaughan, assistant professor of English, said the series is the department’s way of bringing writers with a tie to Oklahoma to our region every spring to discuss writing, the publishing industry and to share their work with all interested parties.

Squires is the author of the novels “Along the Watchtower,” which won the Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction in 2012, and “Live from Medicine Park,” a 2018 Oklahoma Book Award finalist named by Electric Literature as one of the “Seven Candidates for the Great American Rock and Roll Novel.” In 2019, she published a short story collection, “Hit Your Brights.”

Her latest work, published in 2025, is “Low April Sun” (University of Oklahoma Press), described by the press as “the first novel to explore the enduring impact of the Oklahoma City bombing.”

Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Shenandoah, Identity Theory, Bayou, the Dublin Quarterly, This Land, The Almagre Review, Opossum and numerous other magazines. Her nonfiction has appeared in Salon, the New York Times, the Village Voice, World Literature Today, the Philological Review, Largehearted Boy and Rain Taxi, and has been featured on the NPR program “Snap Judgment.” She contributed to The Rolling Stone 500 and wrote the screenplay for Sundance fellow Jeffrey Palmer’s 2015 short film, “Grave Misgivings.” She was a guest on the Rock is Lit podcast in March 2024, discussing “Live from Medicine Park.”

She has read and spoken nationally, most recently as the keynote speaker at the 2018 Radical Writes Conference in Cape Girardeau, Missouri; at Malvern Books in Austin, Texas; and as a featured author at the 2018 Oklahoma Book Festival.

At the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, she teaches a variety of courses in creative writing, with special emphasis on fiction. She received the award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in 2011 and 2017 and currently serves on the Faculty Senate. She has been at UCO since 2006 and holds a doctoral degree in English/Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University.

Event flyer for the Northwestern Oklahoma State University Visiting Writer Series. Text at the top reads

For more information on the Visiting Writer Series, contact Vaughan at dlvaughan@nwosu.edu or (580) 327-8470.

To learn more about the Northwestern Department of English, Foreign Language and Humanities, visit their webpage.

-NW-

Media Contact:
Sean J. Doherty, University Relations Specialist
Email: sjdoherty@nwosu.edu
Phone: (580) 327-8480