The Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series

About The Vanderbilt Reading Series

The Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series is named in honor of Vanderbilt founder Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-grandson and his wife. Each semester, the series brings several professional writers to campus to read from their works and visit classes. This unique and extraordinary program gives English department students and faculty, the Vanderbilt community, and Nashville’s citizens a chance to meet and talk with some of the best writers of our day.

For more information about the Reading Series and to sign up for our e-mail announcement list, please fill out the form below. Additionally, make sure to follow us on Instagram at @vandycreativewriting for more updates on events!

2026-2027 Readings

September 10: Natasha Trethewey, Poetry

Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020) and five collections of poetry, including Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress.

September 24: Peter Orner, Fiction

Peter Orner is the author of eight books, most recently the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, named one of the best books of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, as well as the essay collections, Still No Word from You, a finalist for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay, and Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His story collection Maggie Brown and Others was a New York Times Notable Book. Other books include Love and Shame and Love (Winner of the California Book Award) Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), and Esther Stories. A recipient of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orner is also the editor of three books of oral history for the Voice of Witness series, and co-editor with Laura Lampton Scott of a new oral history series from McSweeney’s called “Dispatches.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Paris Review and has been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. With Yvette Benavides, he’s the co-host of the Lonely Voice Podcast on Texas Public Radio. Orner recently led short courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Melville’s Moby-Dick for the Community of Writers/Writers’ Annex. He teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

October 8: Elise Paschen, Poetry

Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Blood Wolf Moon (winner of the Foreword Indie Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry), as well as Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, Paschen has received the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Medal. Her poems have been published in Poetry Magazine and The New Yorker, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry and A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making as well as The New York Times best-selling anthology, Poetry Speaks to Children, and co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, among other anthologies. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a nationwide program which places poetry posters in subway cars and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

October 29: Ayana Mathis, Fiction

Ayana Mathis is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she became the first African American woman to become an assistant professor in that program. Her most recent novel, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023 and a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Mathis’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and the Financial Times, among others, and she has received support from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

November 12: Poetry & Our Spiritual Lives (New York Campus)

December 3: Victoria Redel, Fiction

Victoria Redel is the author of four books of poetry and six books of fiction, most recently the novel I Am You (2025, Zando/SJPLit). Victoria’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, and O and NOON, among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York and Utah.

Spring 2027

January 14: Matthew Zapruder, Poetry

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry and Story of a Poem. He is editor-at-large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

February 4: Sarah Wang, Fiction

Sarah Wang is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, editor, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Barnard. She is the author of the novel New Skin (Little, Brown 2026). Her writing across genres focuses on mass incarceration, psychoanalysis, surveillance, colonized bodies, contemporary art, class, race, and feminism. Her fiction, cultural criticism, book reviews, essays, and profiles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and American Short Fiction, among other publications.

She has been awarded fellowships from PEN America, the Center for Fiction, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, Ragdale, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Kundiman. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Nancy Zafris Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Frances Andrews Scholar, and the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She has received support from Hawthornden Castle, Hedgebrook, Marble Hill, Edith Wharton/Straw Dog Writers Guild, Monson Arts, Wildacres, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I-Park, Plympton, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Willapa Bay Air, and The Poetry Project.

March 11: Celebration of Southern Writers

April 15: Jane Huffman, Poetry

Jane Huffman is the 2026 winner of the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize for her poetry collection, Dilemma. Her debut collection, PUBLIC ABSTRACT, won the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Dana Levin. Jane is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Denver and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She founded and was editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal, for seven years, and is currently Associate Editor for Denver Quarterly. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Visit the Vanderbilt University Bookstore or view their website here to pick up a book by a writer featured in the Vanderbilt Reading Series!

Event Photos

Fall 2025 – Spring 2026

September 4: Lydi Conklin | September 18: Kimiko Hahn | October 2: Victoria Chang

October 16: Quan Barry | October 31: Stephanie Burt | November 6: Marie-Helene Bertino

December 4: Rita Bullwinkel | February 12: Mitchell S. Jackson | February 19: Prageeta Sharma

April 2: Max McDonough and Kiyoko Reidy | April 16: Melissa Range

Previous Visiting Writers

Please see below for a list of previous visiting writers by year and genre.