BY EMILY WRIGHT
The English department is continuing their Visiting Author series by highlighting an Oklahoma author.
Dr. Constance Squires will be reading from her works April 6 from 6pm to 8pm in the Ranger Room in the Student Center.
The English department encourages students to attend, as Squires’ latest novel relates to a traumatic moment in history for Oklahoma, the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Coming to this talk will demonstrate to students that they have a choice when it comes to making sense of the past as it relates to their lives,” Dr. David Vaughan said, “I suppose you can either sit back, be passive and live your quiet life and not really care, or you can come to events like this and learn how to grapple with difficult, complex and traumatic events in the past,” he continued.
Squires is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma and is an award-winning author.
She has received the Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction with her debut novel and even had her non-fiction writing appear in The New York Times.
Squires is most known for her books “Along the Watchtower” and “Live from Medicine Park.”
Most of Squires’s works are set in Oklahoma, and display themes of redemption, discovering one’s identity and are coming-of-age stories with elements of Rock-N-Roll.
Squires’s latest novel is called “Low April Sun” and is a historical fiction novel that is centered around the events of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
“Low April Sun” was published in 2025, the year of the 20th anniversary of the bombing, which correlates with the time line of the novel.
The novel follows two characters who begin to receive messages from someone thought to have been killed in the OKC bombing.