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 2012-2013 included: poets Nikky Finney, Jennifer Grotz, Robert Wrigley, Adam Zagajewski, Chase Twichell, Thomas Lux, Tracy Smith, Stephen Dobyns, Garrett Hongo, and Michael Longley; fiction writers Dan Chaon, Madison Smartt Bell, Adam Ross, Lauren Groff, and Cary Holladay; and memoirist Charlotte Pierce Baker.
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: fiction writers Randall Kenan and Jill McCorkle; poets Cornelius Eady, Jean Valentine, and Rebecca Seiferle, and memoirists Bich Minh Nguyen and Honor Moore.
In the 2013-2014 academic year we will welcome the following writers to Vanderbilt:
Schedule of Visiting Writers
Poet Cornelius Eady reading in 2009
September 12: Deborah Eisenberg fiction
September 26: Kevin Young poetry
October 3: Steve Stern fiction
October 24: Lynn Emanuel poetry
November 7: Justin Torres fiction
January 16: Dwight Garner nonfiction
January 23: Christine Schutt fiction
January 30: David Wojahn poetry
February 6: Edmund White fiction
February 20: Julie Bruck poetry
March 27: Claudia Emerson poetry
March 28: Chris Bachelder fiction
April 10: Eavan Boland poetry
Writers who read in The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series in earlier years included: 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.
