Courtesy of Panmacmillan.com
On Thursday, Oct. 30, the Frank Manor House filled with students and faculty for a reading by fiction author Alexia Arthurs, the second of six visiting authors in the Lewis & Clark English Department’s 2025–26 Visiting Writers Series. A graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Arthurs has published fiction in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Shondaland, BuzzFeed, Ploughshares and The Paris Review. She now lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as an assistant professor at George Mason University. Arthurs grew up in Jamaica and New York, experiences that continue to shape her writing.
Her first book, “How to Love a Jamaican,” is a collection of 11 short stories that delve into the many complicated facets of the Jamaican American immigrant experience, centering on issues of race, class, gender and family. Her debut collection has been praised for its insightful portrayal of the lives of Jamaican immigrants from a variety of perspectives.
“If you’re not Jamaican, what you have here is a special opportunity to see who we actually are: we’re not at all like you, but absolutely the same. Mostly, Arthurs has written a love letter to Jamaicans, and it feels so good,” wrote Leone Ross in a review of the short story collection for The Guardian.
Together, the collection of stories paints a vibrant portrait of identity and the places that define it.
The event was lively and warm.Light from the fireplace flickered across the wooden floor as Arthurs was welcomed in, introduced by English Professor Pauls Toutonghi. Arthurs called for a moment of silence for the people of Jamaica in the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which recently swept through Haiti and Jamaica. The storm has left a devastating trail of destruction, destroying infrastructure, flooding communities and killing dozens. Despite the extenuating circumstances, Arthurs graciously came to LC to share her writing and answer questions about her work.
During the event, Arthurs read “Bad Behavior,” one of the short stories in “How to Love a Jamaican” and a winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize. The story follows Stacy, a rebellious teenage girl, and her parents, who had decided to send her from the U.S. to live with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping that her grandmother’s traditional values would expunge Stacy’s wayward behavior. The story speaks to mother-daughter relationships, sexuality, family, sacrifice and desire — a tale of culture clash and belonging. When Arthurs fell silent, applause filled the room and she smiled warmly.
“It is important to me to be authentic to my experiences and my family’s experiences. I write from a very emotional place,” Arthurs explained after her reading. “I think it’s okay if readers have to work a little bit to understand outside their culture.”
Students and faculty members asked Arthurs a series of questions surrounding “Bad Behavior,” “How to Love a Jamaican” and her experiences as a writer. Much of her work stems from a deeply personal place, and her eyes lit up as she spoke about her practice. When it comes to emotional writing, Arthurs draws from her “shadowed self” — the personal experiences and values that naturally find their way into her work — to craft the skeleton of her stories.
“In a way, the story feels like me,” Arthurs said. She spoke to the importance of infusing life into her scenes, and how she uses the exciting, confusing and painful things she witnesses to bring her work alive. Students were curious and engaged, and a sense of admiration filled the room as the discussion continued. The event reflected the LC English Department as a whole — steeped in introspection, passion and craft. At the end of the event, Arthurs took time to personally speak with attendees and sign books.
“You have to be somewhat delusional to aspire to be a writer, and that’s okay,” Alexia laughed, encouragingly. “I think that’s healthy. It’s important to have a practice, have a discipline, if you want to be the thing. Really become a student at it,” she said.
Arthurs is currently working on a novel which is set to be released next year. The novel branches out from her typical short story form, taking place exclusively in the U.S. and focusing on two Jamaican American siblings, a brother and sister in their 30s, who are trying to navigate different aspects of their lives, such as work, love and family.
“I feel so very grateful to share parts of myself through my writing,” Arthurs writes on her website. “If you’ve read anything I’ve written, thank you.”
The LC English Department will be hosting three other authors over the course of the next few months as part of the 2025-26 Visiting Authors Series. The next event, featuring poet Rick Barot, is coming up, so mark your calendars. Barot is the author of “The Galleons,” “The Darker Fall,” “Want” and “Chord,” and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University. He now lives in Tacoma, Washington, where he directs the Masters in Fine Arts program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He will be reading in the Armstrong Lounge in the Manor House at 6 p.m. on Feb. 9.
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