The Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series

About the Vanderbilt Reading Series

The Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series is named in honor of Vanderbilt founder Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-grandson and his wife. Each semester, the series brings several professional writers to campus to read from their works and visit classes. This unique and extraordinary program gives English department students and faculty, the Vanderbilt community, and Nashville’s citizens a chance to meet and talk with some of the best writers of our day.

For more information about the Reading Series and to sign up for our e-mail announcement list, please fill out the form below. Additionally, make sure to follow us on Instagram at @vandycreativewriting for more updates on events!

  2025-2026 Readings

September 4: Lydi Conklin, Poetry

Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, will be published in June 2022 by Catapult in the US and Scribner in the UK.

September 18: Kimiko Hahn, Poetry

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. Previous books Foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora, and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.

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. She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

October 2: Victoria Chang, Poetry

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, recipient of the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. She is also the author of The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

October 16: Amy Quan Barry, Fiction

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s northshore, Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including the forthcoming novel, The Unveiling, a work set in Antarctica and which Kirkus Reviews described in a starred review as “a terrifying must-read set at the ends of the earth.” The New York Times named her poetry collection, Auction, once of the five best poetry books of 2023. Barry is one of a select group of writers to receive NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction. Her first play production, The Mytilenean Debate, was staged in the spring of 2022.

October 30: Stephanie Burt, Poetry

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.

November 6: Marie-Helene Bertino, Fiction

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of, most recently, Beautyland, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, she is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Exit Zero, her second short story collection, is out now! She is also the author of the novels 2.am. at The Cat’s Pajamas, Parakeet, and the story collection Safe as Houses, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, Granta, BOMB, Guernica, and many others. Honors include the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30, and has been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts.

December 4: Rita Bullwinkel, Fiction

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of two Books: Headshot (2024) and Belly Up (2018). Headshot was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. In 2025 Bullwinkel was awarded the Addison M. Metcalf Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which biennially honors a young American writer of great promise. She is also a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist and the former deputy editor of The Believer. A selection of each McSweeney’s Quarterly issue she edits is produced for audio by the New York Times. In addition to editing Mcsweeney’s Quarterly (the house’s magazine of art and literature) she also edits one book-length work a year for Mcsweeney’s Book Division. Books for which she has served as editor have been longlisted for national book award and named a best book of the year by the Chicago Review of Books. As an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco, and the Picador guest professor of American literature at Leipzig University in Germany, she taught courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building. Her 2016 first English translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s forgotten noir classic “Detective” (co-translated from the Bangla with Saquib Rahman) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was born in a suburb of San Francisco, in Santa Clara county, and raised across the Bay area. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Visit the Vanderbilt University Bookstore or view their website here to pick up a book by a writer featured in the Vanderbilt Reading Series!

Previous Visiting Writers

Please see below for a list of previous visiting writers by year and genre.