2023 Spring Literary Festival welcomes novelist Megan Giddings on March 29-30

Megan Giddings | photo by Jon Cameron

Megan Giddings, short fiction writer and author of two novels, visits Ohio University for the 2023 Spring Literary Festival, with free public readings and lectures on March 29-30.

Giddings will give a public reading and a craft talk.

Giddings' most recent novel, "The Women Could Fly," was published by Amistad on Aug. 9, 2022. The book is described as “a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother” in which Giddings “explores the limits women face—and the powers they have to transgress and transcend them” and “ingeniously blends her harrowing parable of an all-powerful patriarchy with insights into racial imbalance.”

"The Women Could Fly" is a cerebral novel, one where the prose flutters effortlessly between family history and complex societal structures. Though ostensibly about witches, Giddings leverages both the real and unreal to superb effect—not delineating nor blurring, but venturing slipstream into flowing and surprising prose.

The novel has been placed on multiple best-of lists, including The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2022, Vulture’s Best Fantasy books of 2022, and a New York Times Editor’s choice.

Gidding’s first novel, "Lakewood," came out in 2020. Gidding’s stories have appeared in Story Magazine, The Iowa Review, Catapult, and Gulf Coast, among other places, and has been widely anthologized, including in Best of the Net, Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, and Best Small Fictions.