With the release of her debut short story collection, A KIND OF MADNESS, Uche Okonkwo will read from her work and discuss it with Timothy Schaffert, director of the Creative Writing Program. In vivid, evocative prose, A KIND OF MADNESS (an Oprah Daily “Most Anticipated Book of 2024”) unravels the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings, and more, marking the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in fiction and inviting us all to consider the question: why is it that the people and places we hold closest are so often the ones that drive us to madness?

Uche Okonkwo’s stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir, among others. A former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and resident at Art Omi, she is a recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a Steinbeck Fellowship. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently pursuing a creative writing PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.