event
Vanderbilt Creative Writing Announces MFA Student Reading at The Southern Festival of Books
Oct. 10, 2025—Vanderbilt Creative Writing and The Nashville Review will host an MFA Student Poetry and Fiction Reading at The Southern Festival of Books on Sunday, October 19. Featured writers include Ayesha Asad, Alexandra Green, Kinsale Drake, Athena Nassar, Eliana Reeves, and Kanchi Sharma. The reading begins at 11:30 on the side lawn of the Tennessee State...
Victoria Chang joins the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series
Oct. 7, 2025—Poet Victoria Chang joined the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series on October 2 with her collection With My Back Against the World, which NPR called “poems of remarkable vividness and depth . . . engaging in a constant celebration of life in terms of its inexorable passing, a feast of grief in...
Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination – October 24
Oct. 3, 2025— Friday, October 17 12:00 – 2:00 PM Central Library 211 Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination a lecture by Soraya Murray Soraya Murray contemplates the pivotal figure of the Black technologist, also known as ‘Black tech,’ in technothriller films. This work is part of Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026),...
“Richard Coer de Lyon” and the State of Exception – October 17
Sep. 29, 2025— Friday, October 17 12:00 – 2:00 PM Central Library 211 Desperate Measures Call for Desperate Times: Richard Coer de Lyon and the State of Exception a lecture by Mariah Min The Middle English Romance Richard Coer de Lyon considers the crusades to be an emergency that necessitates extreme measures. Simultaneously, the enormity of Richard’s transgressions is...
Internship Search Party – October 1
Sep. 24, 2025—Wednesday, October 1 6:00 – 8:00 PM Divinity School 127 Want to learn more about finding internships appropriate for humanities majors? Alayna Hayes, Senior Director of the Career Center, will introduce successful search strategies! Dinner from Chipotle will be served.
Jared Harvey’s new novel available now
Sep. 24, 2025—Lecturer Jared Harvey‘s latest novel is now available from Asterism Books. Soft Lighting is written almost exclusively in the first-person singular and plural, and stages a motley of narrators (or only one) who respond to one another or who do not, and if not, I wonder whether desire for interpersonal connection withers, or excruciates. There is no...
Lydi Conklin joins the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series
Sep. 19, 2025—Assistant Professor Lydi Conklin joined the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series on September 4 to share their new novel Songs of No Provenance. In addition to reading from the work, which the Chicago Review of Books called “a great American music novel . . . a lush, wild story, textured with sensory and technical descriptions...
See Our Calendar
Aug. 6, 2025—Check out our department calendar for academic deadlines and upcoming events!
(2/8/2022) Virtual Event with Destiny O. Birdsong
Feb. 1, 2022—MFA alum Destiny O. Birdsong will be doing a virtual event with Parnassus in conversation with Vanderbilt poetry alum Stephanie Pruitt Gaines. This event will celebrate Destiny’s new book Nobody’s Magic, which comes out February 8th. This virtual event will take place Tuesday, February 8 at 6:30 PM CT. More event details can be found here.
(4/7/2022) Aimee Bender, fiction reading: 7 PM, Virtual
Jan. 8, 2022— Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of...