MCC Daily Tribune

Announcing Spring 2026 Visiting Writer Series

The Creative Arts Committee is thrilled to announce our Spring 2026 Visiting Writer Series! We hope to see as many MCC faculty, students, and staff at these events as possible. Please contact Maria Brandt (mbrandt@monroecc.edu) for more information.

Visiting Creative Writing Alumnus, Vinh Nguyen

Friday, February 13, 2026
Workshop and Conversation: 9am to 9:50am, MCC's Brighton Campus, Building 9, Room 242, Zoom link TBA
Free and Open to the Public

Vinh Nguyen has crafted and showcased his animated films in many festivals, some winning multiple awards. Recently, his film I Had To was part of the One Take Docu Series which was screened at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. As a graduate student, he also has been a part of many film projects, including Animation Supervisor on the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films advert in which he and his team worked on an animated portion of the project's commercial and multiple other roles (i.e. key frame animator, inbetweener, clean up artist, VFX artist) helping students tell their stories. He’s most excited to make films because it acts as a medium for storytelling. Specifically, working with those who want to tell their stories but don’t necessarily have the means to. After studying at MCC, Nguyen received his BS in Creative Writing at SUNY Brockport and his Masters of Fine Arts in Animation from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Visiting Playwright, Anne Washburn

Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 7pm to 8pm, Black Box Theater, Reading and Conversation
Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 10am to 10:50am, Black Box Theater, Interdisciplinary Theatre Workshop
Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 12pm to 12:50pm, MCC's Brighton Campus, Building 8, Room 200, Playwriting Workshop
All Events Free and Open to the Public

Anne Washburn is a New York-based playwright. Washburn’s plays include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pnuematica, The Buring Cauldron of Fiery Fire, A Devil at Noon, Apparition, The Community Dracula Pageant, I Have Loved Strangers, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, The Internationalist, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides’ Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has been produced nationally and internationally and has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Fogler, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater, and Woolly Mammoth. Honors include a Guggenheim, a Whiting, an Alpert Award, a PEN/Laura Pels award for artist in mid-career, a NYFA Fellowship, a Time Warner Fellowship, two-time finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.

Visiting Poet, Kai Coggin

Poetry Reading: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 7pm to 8pm, The Forum
Poetry Workshop: Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 12pm to 12:50pm, MCC's Brighton Campus, Building 8, Room 200
Free and Open to the Public

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, along with an INTERCHANGE Community Grant, and the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service. Her poems have been published in POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Best of the Net, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. Visit Kai Coggin's website (www.kaicoggin.com).

Maria Brandt
English and Philosophy, Creative Arts
12/02/2025