It would be easy to imagine that an award-winning author of 17 published novels has always been a literary genius. Yet, Stewart O’Nan, the university’s 2017 Cockefair Writer-in-Residence, started out as an engineer.

The Cockefair Writer-in-Residence is one of the creative writing department’s most significant annual programs. This year, O’Nan taught a class to graduate students on Oct. 23 and followed it with an Oct. 24 reading at the Plaza Library.

“I first read one of O’Nan’s books as a graduate student in Indiana,” English professor Christie Hodgen reminisced as she introduced O’Nan at the reading. “People were passing it around like a great secret, saying, ‘You’ve got to read this.’”

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