ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

Alice Mattison is a widely acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. Her memoir, Eye Trouble is forthcoming in 2027; What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, ed. by Chad Wriglesworth, will appear in July, 2026. She’s the author of seven novels, most recently Conscience, and a book about writing, The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. Her earlier novels include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and When We Argued All Night, and she is also the author of four books of stories, including In Case We’re Separated, and a collection of poems, Animals. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. Alice has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for more than twenty years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College.

September 23, 2026

Russell House

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the Department of English

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's interdisciplinary practice encompasses poetry, archival research, artist books, and large-scale art works. With Marta Werner she coedited The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems (2012), which was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2014 Pegasus Award for Criticism and made Best Books of 2013 lists in the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement and Hyperallergic. Her other books include Draft Notation (2014), The Dickinson Composites (2010), The Silver Book (2010), The Desert (2008), A Non- Breaking Space (2005), and Nets (2004). Current research for her Creative Capital project—The Silk Poems, an experimental book nano-imprinted on silk film—includes consulting nano-technology and biomedical labs, medical libraries, and over 50 international textile archives and sericulture museums.

October 14, 2026

Russell House

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

Darcey Steinke is the author most recently of the memoir This is the Door. Her other books include the memoirs Flash Count Diary, Easter Everywhere and five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and many have been New York Times Notables. Her nonfiction has appeared widely and she often writes about art. Her web story "Blindspot" was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and on the long list of the Independent Book Award and the French Arles Author Prize.
She has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

Novemeber 11, 2026

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

 

 

Brontez Purnell

Brontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned dancer, performance artist, and zine-maker. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for two decades.

Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer

February 17, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn.
He’s an Executive Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprint AUWA (headed by Questlove), where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Catherine Lacey, Bryan Washington, Laura van den Berg, Madeline Cash, Henry Hoke, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Imogen Binnie, Shon Faye, Thomas Grattan, Andrew Durbin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Venita Blackburn, Missouri Williams, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and several Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and PEN Awards.

Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer

February 17, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

Canisia Lubrin

Writer, critic, editor, and teacher Canisia Lubrin grew up in St. Lucia. She studied at York University and earned an MFA at the University of Guelph. Lubrin is the author of the poetry collections The Dyzgraphxst (2020) and Voodoo Hypothesis (2017), which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has been translated into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin was a 2019 writer-in-residence at Queens University and has taught in the English department at Humber College. She has worked as an arts administrator and a community advocate for nearly 20 years. She lives in Whitby, Ontario.

Millett Visiting Writer

March 24, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American author and journalist. Her forthcoming collection, Our Arab, explores the tensions and aburdities of migration and displacement. Her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay’s favorite book of 2020. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Granta, The Believer, Harper’s Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, and numerous other publications. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives with her wife and two toddlers in New York.

Jacob Julien Visiting Writer

April 14, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

Heather Cleary is writer and award-winning translator based in Mexico City. Her writing has appeared in Two Lines, Lit Hub, and Poets & Writers, among other publications; her book, The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, shows how narratives of translation can upend established notions of intellectual property and propriety. She co-edited McSweeney’s 65: Plundered with Valeria Luiselli and Tsunami with Gabriela Jauregui, and is currently writing a novel about translation and betrayal.

April 21, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department

María Ospina

María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a professor of Latin American culture at ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½. Her first book of fiction, the short story collection Azares del cuerpo, was published in Colombia, Chile, and Spain, and was translated into Italian and English (Variations on the Body). Her stories have appeared in Colombian anthologies and in literary magazines in the United States. She has also written extensively about contemporary Colombian culture in light of legacies of extractivism, violence, and war, including the book Memory’s Conundrum: Literature, Film, and Testimony at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Only a Little While Here, winner of the Colombian National Novel Award (2024) and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Literature (2023) is her first novel.

April 21, 2027

Russell House 

350 High St.

6:00pm

Sponsored by Creative Writing in the English Department