2023-24 Reading Series

Sept. 27 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.” The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin.

Photo credit: Wolfgang Bozic

Oct. 5 | 6:30 p.m. | English House Lecture Hall

Patricia Smith, winner of the 2021 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement, is the author of eight critically volumes of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 LA Times Book Prize, an 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; and Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award. Smith is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Nov. 29 | 6:30 p.m | English House Lecture Hall

Tae Keller '15 is the Newbery award winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of When You Trap a Tiger and Jennifer Chan is Not Alone. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she subsisted on kimchi, purple rice, and stories. Now, she writes about biracial girls trying to find their voices, and lives in Seattle with her husband and a multitude of books.

Photo credit: Saavedra Photography