Literary Landscapes of the Midwest

Event Details

This panel will feature a conversation about Midwestern literature that travels widely through time and space—beginning with hyperlocal experience and building toward a larger mosaic of the diverse stories we tell about our region. Panelists have all contributed to The New Territory’s Literary Landscapes series, which publishes short personal essays about the places of Midwestern literature. 

About the panelists

Dawn Burns is thoroughly Midwestern, having lived their whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Often their characters are Midwestern too, like Evangelina from Elkhart in Evangelina Everyday (2022) and Dawn Tempers from Hanna, Indiana, in their genre-bending novel A Green Glow on the Horizon: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors (forthcoming 2026). 

  Burns’s MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame prepared them for a lifetime of writing, creative community building, and teaching. Burns is founder of the SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. An assistant professor at Michigan State University, Burns is committed to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond the classroom. You can find Burns online at www.dawnburns42.com. 

Olga L. Herrera is associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Her research and teaching interests include literary Chicago, Latinx literature, and city studies. She is at work on a project examining coming-of-age stories in the work of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sandra Cisneros.  

Leah Milne is the author of Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives, winner of the 2021 Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award. Her co-authored book, The Honeyfish Collective Presents Fieldnotes on Contemporary Black Poetry, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis, and her work has appeared in MELUS, African American Review, Newsweek, and Ms. Magazine. 

Andy Oler wrote Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature (2019) and edited Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest (forthcoming 2025), Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Midwestern Places (2018). He is Departments Editor for The New Territory magazine, where he founded and edits the online series Literary Landscapes. He teaches writing and literature classes in Florida, which is further from the Midwest than he’d like. 

Ross K. Tangedal is associate professor of English and director/publisher of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. The author or editor of several books, articles, and chapters on American literature, including The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2021), Editing the Harlem Renaissance, edited with Joshua Murray (Clemson UP, 2021), and Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell, edited with Andy Oler and Lisa DeRose (Michigan State University Press, 2023), his forthcoming books include Good Country: Ernest Hemingway and the American West (University of Nevada Press), edited with Douglas Sheldon, and The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited with Helen Turner and Philip McGowan. He has served as an associate volume editor for the Hemingway Letters Project since 2018, and he is currently developing a multivolume edition of the Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald with Jennifer Nolan. He lives in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, with his wife, CJ, and their three kids: Adeline, Hazel, and Charles.