Visiting Writers Series

Lia Purpura

Thursday, September 19, 2024, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections, including essays, poems and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for “On Looking” (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the AWP Award and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence and elsewhere. Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Loyola University; other teaching venues include the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility and the Glenwood Life Recovery Center. Her newest collections are “It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful” (poems) and “All the Fierce Tethers” (essays).

Noé Álvarez

Thursday, October 24, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Noé Álvarez is the author of “Accordion Eulogies” (Catapult, 2024) and “Spirit Run” (Catapult, 2020). He was born in the desert and raised in the weeds.

Georgia Cloepfil

Thursday, November 14, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Georgia Cloepfil’s nonfiction debut, “The Striker and the Clock” was published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.) in July, 2024. Her other writing can be found in The Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, n+1, Colorado Review, Joyland and Epiphany, among other places. Select essays have been featured on Longreads, The Rumpus, and WBUR Boston’s Only a Game. She holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and works at Whitman College as Assistant Women’s Soccer Coach and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Rhetoric.

Creative Writing Student Readings

Thursday, Dec. 5, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Details to be announced.

Nathan Harris

Thursday, March 6, 2025, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Nathan Harris holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. His debut novel, “The Sweetness of Water” (Little Brown, 2021), was the summer selection of Oprah’s Book Club. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was included in President Obama’s Summer Reading List. Harris was honored as one of 5 Under 35 by the National Book Foundation and has had his work featured in The Best American Short Stories of 2023. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Idra Novey

Thursday, April 3, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Idra Novey is a poet, novelist and translator. Her recent novel “Take What You Need” was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize. Her second poetry collection “Exit, Civilian” was chosen by Patricia Smith for the National Poetry Series. She is the co-translator with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian’s, “Lean Against This Late Hour,” a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. Novey’s fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Her new book of poems “Soon & Wholly” was released in fall 2024. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

Justin Gardiner & Rose McClarney

Thursday, May 1, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are “Colorfast,” “Forage” and “Its Day Being Gone,” from Penguin Poets, as well as “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains,” published by Four Way Books. She is co-editor of “A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia,” from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Justin Gardiner is the author of three books: the long-form lyric essay “Small Altars,” winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; “Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic,” published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection “Naming the Lifeboat” from Main Street Rag. In 2012–2013, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, where he was awarded both the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.

Creative Writing Student Readings

Thursday, May 8, 6 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre

Details to be announced.