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, Fiction

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

September 18: Kimiko Hahn, Poetry

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

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

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

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: Quan Barry, Fiction

Alumni Hall 202 Memorial Hall – 23rd Ave N, Nashville, TN 37212

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, 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, one 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

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

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. Please click here to view the video summarizing Stephanie’s class at Harvard.

November 6: Marie-Helene Bertino, Fiction

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of five works of fiction, most recently Exit Zero, a story collection. Her novel Beautyland, winner of the American Book Award, was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, she has received the  O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. Making creative writing resources more widely available has been at the base of her pursuits. In June 2021, “Disrupting Realism,” an online master class and panel she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts, and is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.

December 4: Rita Bullwinkel, Fiction

Special Collections Library, Second Floor Large Event Space – 1101 19th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

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 the 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.

Spring 2026

January 29: Mitchell Jackson, Fiction

Location TBA

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by the New York Times, as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.

February 19: Prageeta Sharma, Poetry

Location TBA

Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Onement Won (Wave, 2025) and Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019). Her honors and awards include a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Award. She has taught at the New School, Goddard College, and the University of Montana-Missoula. She is the Henry G. Lee professor of English at Pomona College as well as the founder and president of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, and Literary Studies.

April 16: Melissa Range, Poetry (VU Literary Prize Winner)

Location TBA

Melissa Range is the winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize for Printer’s Fist, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in 2026, as well as the author of Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

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

Event Photos

November

Marie-Helene Bertino

October

Stephanie Burt

Quan Barry

Victoria Chang

September

Kimiko Hahn

Lydi Conklin

Previous Visiting Writers

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