Vanderbilt Reading Series welcomes novelist Rita Bullwinkel – December 4
Thursday, December 4
Book-signing, 6:30 PM
Reading, 7:00 PM
Vanderbilt Special Collections Library
1101 19th Ave South
Nashville, TN 37212
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the novels Headshot (2024) and Belly Up (2018). Headshot was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and Gordon Burn Prize. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. In 2025, Bullwinkel was awarded the Addison M. Metcalf Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which biennially honors a young American writer of great promise. She is a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist, and the former deputy editor of The Believer. A selection of each McSweeney’s Quarterly issue she edits is produced for audio by the New York Times. In addition to editing McSweeney’s Quarterly (the house’s magazine of art and literature), Professor Bullwinkel also edits one book-length work a year for McSweeney’s Book Division. Books for which she has served as editor have been longlisted for the National Book Award and named a “Best Book of the Year” by the Chicago Review of Books. As an assistant professor of English at University of San Francisco, and the Picador Guest Professor of American Literature at Leipzig University in Germany, she has taught courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building. Her 2016 first English translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s forgotten noir classic “Detective” (co-translated from the Bangla with Saquib Rahman) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was born in a suburb of San Francisco, in Santa Clara county, and raised across the Bay area. She lives and works in San Francisco and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt.
Read Professor Bullwinkel’s essay, “Why I Write,” published shortly after Headshot.
This event is part of the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series.