Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series

About the Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series

The Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers 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 Visiting Writers Series or to sign up for our e-mail announcement list, contact René Colehour in the Creative Writing program.

Stay Tuned for Updates on Fall 2023-Spring 2024 Visiting Writer Schedule

Fall 2023 Readings

♦September 21, 2023, Vanderbilt Bookstore: Sigrid Nunez, Fiction

Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her new novel, The Vulnerables, will be published by Riverhead Books in November 2023. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. She lives in New York City.

♦September 28, 7 PM, Buttrick 101: Patricia Smith, Poetry

♦October 12, 7 PM, Buttrick 101: Jamil Jan Kochai, Fiction

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award.  His debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar, was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.  His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories.  His essays have been published in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.  Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

♦October 26, 7 PM, Buttrick 101: Michael Collier, Poetry

Michael Collier is the author of eight books of poems, among them, The Missing Mountain: New & Selected Poems and The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Collier has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences from 1994-2017 and Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he is an emeritus professor of English.

♦November 9, 7 PM, Buttrick 101: Angie Cruz, Fiction

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022) is a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, shortlisted for The Aspen Words Literary Prize, winner of the Gold Medal, Latino Book Award/The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Book Award, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize and chosen for The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction. Her novel, Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee and the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including the Lighthouse Fellowship, Siena Art Institute, and the Macdowell Arts Colony. She’s published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and other journals. She’s the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix) and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh.She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York and Turin.

♦November 30, 7 PM, Vanderbilt Bookstore: Maggie Millner, Poetry

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, published by FSG (US). Maggie’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.

Maggie was the 2020–’21 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–’20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–’18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where she received her MFA. She is also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Community of Writers, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center, as well as the Robert & Adele Schiff Award, the 10th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize, and the Third Coast Poetry Prize.

Spring 2024 Readings

♦January 25, 7 PM: Megan Fernandez, Poetry

Megan Fernandes is the author of I Do Everything I’m Told, and Good Boys, a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize, the Saturnalia Book Prize, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has work published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others.

Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College, where she teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory courses.

♦February 22, 7 PM: Sidik Fofana, Fiction

Sidik Fofana is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem.   His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn.

♦March 21, 7 PM: Edgar Kunz, Poetry

Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer (Ecco, 2023) and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American.

He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

♦March 21, 7 PM: Anders Carlson-Wee, Poetry

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in October 2023.  He is also the author of The Low Passions, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the Poetry International Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University.

♦March 21, 7 PM: Claire Jiménez, Fiction

Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (2023). Jimenez received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. She is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.

♦April 4, 7 PM: Bianca Stone, poetry

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick. Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She teaches poetry and poetic study classes at the Ruth Stone House, where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.

♦April 18, 7 PM: Rebecca Makkai, Fiction

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University and the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Previous Visiting Writers

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