Raymond Carver Reading Series
The Raymond Carver Reading Series features twelve to fourteen prominent writers yearly as part of a large undergraduate class taught by TAs from the Creative Writing Program. The readings have an extended question-and-answer session along with a reading. Recent authors include Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jamaal May, Monica Youn, Brandon Taylor, Valeria Luiselli, Ilya Kaminsky, and Percival Everett..
Due to the generous support of Leonard and Elise Elman two distinguished authors each year spend two-day residencies at SU: the Richard Elman Visiting Writer and the Leonard and Elise Elman Visiting Writer. Learn more about Leonard in his interview with Rob Enslin.
Past readings have been recorded and are in the process of being made available online by Bird Library at SUrface.
All readings take place in Gifford Auditorium. They begin at 5:00 p.m. and are preceded by a question-and-answer session that begins at 4:00 p.m. They are open to the public.
Duy Đoàn
February 1, 2023
Photo by Qiuhong Yu
Duy Đoàn (pronounced zwē dwän / zwee dwahn) is the author of We Play a Game (Yale University Press), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Duy’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has been featured in PBS’s Poetry in America and Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. He received an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he later served as director of the Favorite Poem Project. He lives in Queens, New York.
Brandon Hobson, the Don MacNaughton Reader
February 22, 2023
Dr. Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. He received his PhD from Oklahoma State University. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Reading the West Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other distinctions.
His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.
Nicole Terez Dutton
March 1, 2023
Nicole Terez Dutton's work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Indiana Review and Salt Hill Journal. Nicole earned an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her collection of poems, If One Of Us Should Fall, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program and is the Editor of the Kenyon Review.
Katie Kitamura, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer
March 22, 2023
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.
Her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Andrea Cohen
April 5, 2023
Photo by Jean Wilcox
Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. A new book of poems, Everything, was published by Four Way Books in 2021. Other collections include Nightshade (Four Way, 2019). Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999).
Cohen’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. She taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the summer of 2022 and the MFA program at Boston University in the fall of 2022. Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.
Chinelo Okparanta, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer
April 26, 2023
Photo by Obi Umeozor
Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.
She is a winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award, a 2016 Lambda Literary Award, the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, and a 2014 O. Henry Prize. Her debut short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was cited as an editors’ choice in the New York Times Book Review and was named on the list of The Guardian’s Best African Fiction of 2013. The book was nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award (Young Motivational Writer of the Year), longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the 2014 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
She has published work in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, AGNI, and other venues. In 2017, Okparanta was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Under the Udala Trees is her first novel. Her second novel is Harry Sylvester Bird (HarperCollins/Mariner Books USA, 2022).