Award-winning novelist wraps up Writer's Project series

QUEENSBURY, New York (Dec. 5, 2025) — Wendy Chin-Tanner grew up imagining her father's teen years in a Narnia-like place, when in reality he was being treated for leprosy in the deep South.

“Carville was a remarkable place,” Chin-Tanner said in an interview about her book “King of the Armadillos,” from which she will read at 12:40 p.m. Monday as part of SUNY Adirondack’s Writer’s Project series.

Carville Leprosarium in Louisiana — also known as the National Leprosarium or Gillis W. Long Hansen’s Disease Center — was cast as a magical backdrop in the stories her father told her when she was a child. Once Chin-Tanner realized few people, even those in medical professions, had not heard about the facility, it became central to her fictionalized version of her father’s journey.

“My father was given music lessons, finished high school there, was exposed to this way of being an American, politically active and engaged, which he brought with him into adulthood and fatherhood,” she said in an ABC News interview.

Chin-Tanner’s talk Monday is the final event in the Fall Writer’s Project series at the college. Admission is free and open to the public. The event will be held in the Visual Arts Gallery in Dearlove Hall. Those unable to attend in person can do so via Zoom at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7977212478?pwd=ZXU5WlpJRXZ1YmZoNFNJak1yYVpSUT09.

Chin-Tanner was awarded the Louisiana Literary Award for “King of the Armadillos.” She is also author of the poetry collections “Turn,” which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and “Anyone Will Tell You.”

She is editor of “Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology,” co-author of the graphic novel “American Terrorist,” and co-founder of A Wave Blue World, an independent publishing company for graphic novels.

Wendy’s poems and essays have been featured in numerous journals and publications, including Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, The Collagist, Salon, Gay Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub and DAME Magazine. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Paste Magazine, Deep South Magazine and The Southern Bookseller.

She was founding editor at KIN Poetry Journal, a poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown for more than a decade, and staff interviewer at Lantern Review.

She was educated at Cambridge University, where she studied English literature and sociology. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.