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 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.
During the 2011-2012 academic year, we will welcome the following writers to Vanderbilt:
Schedule of Visiting Writers
September 16 Billy Collins (poetry)
September 22 Terrance Hayes, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry, and Jaimy Gordon, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction.
October 13 Christopher Buckley (poetry)
- Poet Cornelius Eady reading in 2009
October 20 Rattawut Lapchoreonsap (fiction)
November 3 Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (fiction)
November 10 Nick Flynn (poetry & nonfiction)
November 17 Anthony Doerr (fiction)
January 12 Wells Tower (fiction)
January 19 Lorrie Moore (fiction) in the Chancellor’s Lecture Series
January 26 Alicia Ostriker (poetry)
February 9 Bonnie Jo Campbell (fiction)
Link to Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Blog about her recent visit: http://bone-eye.blogspot.com/2012/02/nashville-skyline.html
March 15 Manuel Munoz (fiction)
March 29 Elizabeth Spires (poetry)
April 3 Don Paterson (poetry), interviewed after the reading by Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America
April 19 Maile Meloy (fiction)
Among those writers who have read in The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series in past years are: 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 * Chase Twichell * 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 * Madison Smartt Bell * Sydney Lea * Marita Golden * Antonya Nelson * Gerald Stern * Eileen Simpson * Karen Yamashita * Richard Bausch * Elizabeth Spires * 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.
