2024-25 Reading Series

Feb. 5th | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Feb. 26th | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Dantiel W. Moniz is a 2024 USA Fellow, the recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and Fellowships from Yaddo, The Lighthouse Works, and MacDowell, among others. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Tin House, and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches fiction.

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.

Mar. 25th | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Zara Chowdhary is a writer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin and author of the memoir The Lucky Ones (2024). She has an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University and a master's in writing for performance from the University of Leeds. She has previously written for documentary television, advertising, and film. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partner, child, and two cats.

Apr. 2nd | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She's received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y "Discovery" Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. A MacDowell Fellow, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award winner, and former high school physics teacher, she is an assistant professor in the University of California, Davis MFA.

Apr. 9th | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Paul Harding is the author of three novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, Enon, and This Other Eden, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College.

Oct. 9 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room

Douglas Stuart is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than 40 languages. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was also named British Book of the Year and Debut of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards and was a finalist for more than 20 other literary awards. His latest novel, Young Mungo, was a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His essays on gender, class, and conformity have appeared on Lit Hub, and his short stories are published in The New Yorker. He is currently working on adapting both of his novels for A24 Pictures. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Stuart has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in New York City.

Oct. 30 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Maya C. Popa is the author of two collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) named one of the Guardian’s recent best books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of the English department bursary for exceptional merit. She was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she received her MA, and a Veterans Fellow at NYU, where she earned her MFA. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling literature publications. Since 2018, she has served as the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School. She teaches advanced poetry at NYU and runs the online writing community Conscious Writers Collective.