Visiting Authors: 2020-present
Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series
2025 Percival Everett, novelist, short story writer, poet
Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Kirkus Prize, PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Los Angeles Review of Books/UCR Lifetime Achievement Award, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2), Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award (2), Dos Passos Prize
Selected Works: Suder (1983), Zulus (1990), Watershed (1996), The Body of Martin Aguilera (1997), Glyph (1999), Erasure (2001), A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (with James Kincaid) (2004), Damned if I Do: Stories (2004), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), Half an Inch of Water (2015), Telephone (2020), The Trees (2021), Dr. No (2022), Sonnets for a Missing Key (2024), James (2024)
2024 Tracy K. Smith: Poet, memoirist, editor, translator, librettist
Poet Laureate of the United States, 2017-2019; Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; elected member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American
Philosophical Society. Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy Fellowship of the
Academy of American Poets, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, a Smithsonian Ingenuity
Award, and an Essence Literary Award.
Major Works, Poetry: The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011), Wade in the
Water (2019),
Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2022). Prose: Ordinary Light (2015). To Free the Captives (2023).
Librettos: Castor and Patience (2022), The Righteous (2024).
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2023 Robert Jones, Jr.: Novelist and essayist
New York Times bestselling author, Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, NAIBA Book of the Year Award,
National Book Award finalist
Major Works: Son of Baldwin, The Prophets
2022 Brit Bennett: Novelist and essayist
New York Times bestselling author, Hopwood Award, Hurston/Wright Award
Major works: The Mothers, The Vanishing Half
2020-21 Roxane Gay: Writer of memoir and fiction, essayist, editor, and anthologist
National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community,
Pen Center USA Freedom to Write Award, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, Eisner Award,
two Lambda Literary Awards
Major works: Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Black Panther: World of Wakanda, Difficult Women, Hunger,
Not that Bad, The Best American Short Stories 2018, The Banks, the Selected Works of Audre Lorde,
Graceful Burdens, The Sacrifice of Darkness​​
