Each semester the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series brings writers to campus to read from their work and visit classes. We’re proud of our readings series, an extraordinary program that gives our students a chance to meet and talk with some of the best writers of our day.
Readers in the 2011-2012 academic year, included: fiction writers Jaimy Gordon, Rattawut Lapchoreonsap, Anthony Doerr, Wells Tower, Lorrie Moore, Manuel Munoz, Maile Meloy, and Bonnie Jo Campbell, and poets Billy Collins, Christopher Buckley, Terrance Hayes, Nick Flynn, Alicia Ostriker, Elizabeth Spires, and Don Paterson.
Readers in 2010-2011 included: poets Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, Ciaran Carson, Tom Sleigh, Jericho Brown, Edward Hirsch, Molly Peacock, Mary Kinzie, and Bobby Rogers; and fiction writers Bobbie Ann Mason, Tom Perrotta, Salvatore Scibona, Peter Ho Davies, Aimee Bender, Lydia Peelle, and Holly Goddard Jones.
Readers in 2009-2010 included: poets Cornelius Eady, Jean Valentine, and Rebecca Seiferle, fiction writers Randall Kenan and Jill McCorkle, and memoirists Bich Minh Nguyen and Honor Moore.
In the 2012-2013 academic year we will welcome the following writers to Vanderbilt:
Schedule of Visiting Writers and Symposia on Writing
September 13 National Book Award winner Nikky Finney (poetry)
September 20 Jennifer Grotz (poetry)
Poet Cornelius Eady reading in 2009
October 18 Dan Chaon (fiction)
October 25 Robert Wrigley (poetry)
November 1 Adam Zagajewski (poetry)
November 29 Chase Twichell (poetry)
January 10 Thomas Lux (poetry)
January 17 Charlotte Pierce Baker (nonfiction)
January 31 Madison Smartt Bell (fiction)
February 14 Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Smith (poetry)
February 21 Adam Ross (fiction)
February 27 and 28 Symposium on the Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity
March 14 Stephen Dobyns (poetry)
March 21 Garrett Hongo (poetry)
March 22 Lauren Groff (fiction)
March 28 Cary Holladay (fiction
April 11 Michael Longley (poetry)
April 12 Symposium on Edward Thomas: Edna Longley, Michael Longley, Greg Delanty, Mark Jarman and Sandy Solomon
Writers who have read in The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series in prior years include: Robert Penn Warren * Eudora Welty * Kingsley Amis * V.S. Pritchett * Elizabeth Spencer * Yusef Komunyakaa * Junot Diaz * Ruth Fainlight * Rose Tremain * Allan Sillitoe * Rita Dove * Agha Shahid Ali * Ellen Gilchrist * Marilyn Nelson * Garrett Hongo * Judith Ortiz Cofer * William Matthews * Diane Ackerman * Ellen Douglas * Margot Livesey * Jessica Hagedorn * Alan Shapiro * Julia Alvarez * Seamus Heaney * Charles Wright * J.M.Coetzee * Richard Ford * Maxine Kumin * Wyatt Prunty * Ellen Bryant Voigt * Robert Lowell * Pauline Kael * David Lehman * Linda Gregerson * James Wood * Stanley Elkin * Lee Smith * Chang-rae Lee * Al Young * Wally Lamb * Donald Justice * Philip Levine * Peter Matthiessen * Andrew Hudgins * Medbh McGuckian * Erin McGraw * Sydney Lea * Marita Golden * Antonya Nelson * Gerald Stern * Eileen Simpson * Karen Yamashita * Richard Bausch * Richard Tillinghast * Anne Patchett * Martín Espada * Tony Hoagland * R. S. Gwynn * Mary Gordon * T. R. Hummer * Alison Lurie * Fred Chappell * Pam Durban * Craig Arnold
Fiction writer Salvatore Scibona reading in 2010
To get more information about the Gertrude and Harold Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series or to request that your name be added to our e-mail announcement list, contact Margaret Quigley at creativewriting@vanderbilt.edu or 615-322-6527.
