Location: UMKC Student Union, 5100 Cherry St. | Room 401

Writers for Readers, the season's most anticipated literary event, returns with an exciting lineup featuring celebrated author Gillian Flynn and the announcement of this year's Maya Angelou Book Award winner for fiction.

Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times’ bestseller Gone Girl, for which she wrote the Golden Globe-nominated screenplay, and the New York Times’ bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects. Her latest project is Gillian Flynn Books in partnership with Zando, an imprint committed to publishing books across genres that are propulsive, culturally incisive, and unexpected.

Flynn, the showrunner for Amazon's Utopia and co-writer of Widows with director Steve McQueen, sits down with Whitney Terrell, Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, for a conversation about her life and work.

Terrell is the author of three novels including The Good Lieutenant, which was selected as a best book of 2016 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the digital media and entertainment website Refinery 29.

The Maya Angelou Book Award, which this event supports, is a national literary honor established by the Kansas City Public Library, UMKC, and five other state universities in 2020. It recognizes authors and notable new releases of American fiction and poetry (in alternating years) contributing to literature, social justice, and inclusion. It comes with a $10,000 stipend.

Proceeds from the Writers for Readers event fund graduate internships for students who support the Maya Angelou Book Award or teach free, public writing classes at Library locations. Writers for Readers is an ongoing partnership between the Kansas City Public Library and the UMKC MFA program in creative writing.