Come join the MFA in Creative Writing Program to celebrate Prof. Emerita Michelle Herman's book launch of If You Say So! If You Say So contains true stories about loss and reinvention, longing and loneliness, friendship and community, and family and home—and dance, the dedicated practice of which has led the author on an unexpected new path. This is a book about grief and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in the body too. This event is free and open to the public, and books will be available for sale from Prologue Bookshop.
Michelle Herman was a founder of OSU’s MFA program in creative writing, as well as the founder of the interdisciplinary graduate program in the arts (GISFA). She taught at OSU for 34 years until her retirement from full time teaching in 2022. If You Say So is her tenth book—her fourth collection of essays, after The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song. Other books include the novels Close-Up, Missing, Dog, and Devotion, and the novella collection A New and Glorious Life. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her awards and honors include numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, and two major teaching awards from OSU–the University Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rodica Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring. She continues at OSU in her role as the executive and artistic director of the Young Writers Workshop, our all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program for teenagers, and teaches an annual seminar that helps first-year students adjust to/process their new lives as college students through conversation and movement. She is also a dancer who performs with FluxFlow Dance Project, and since 2019 she has written a popular advice column for Slate.