LITERARY FESTIVAL AND SIGNATURE EVENTS
A highly anticipated annual tradition, the 棉花糖直播 Literary Festival takes place each spring. The festival hosts major poets and fiction writers on campus to give readings and meet with students.
Visiting fiction writers have included Jonathan Franzen, Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Chang-Rae Lee, Junot Diaz, Lydia Davis, and Diana Abu-Jaber. Poets have included Marilyn Chin, Robert Creeley, Mark Doty, and Harryette Mullen.
Sponsored by the English Department, this event reflects our commitment to celebrating and cultivating the ongoing role of literature in American life.
Please enjoy our back catalogue of speaker videos .
Lit Fest 2024 Speakers
All readings will begin at 7 p.m.
February 15: V. V. Ganeshananthan
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors鈥� Choice, and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.
Photo by Sophia Mayrhofer
March 12: Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She also hosted American Public Media's daily radio program and podcast , which is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, courtesy of Blue Flower Arts
March 14: Emilie Pine
Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely as an academic and critic. Her first collection of personal essays听Notes to Self听won the Butler Literary Award, the Sunday听Independent听Newcomer of the Year Award, and Book of the Year 2018 at the Irish Book Awards. Emilie Pine is the 2024 Heimbold Chair.
April 3: 听Carolyn Forch茅
Carolyn Forch茅鈥檚 first volume,听Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by听The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and听Blue Hour.听Her most recent collection is听In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir听What You Have Heard Is True听(Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman鈥檚 brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology,听Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as 鈥渋tself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,鈥� and is followed by the 2014 anthology听The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.
Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts