Delbrook Visiting Writers Series

N.K. Jemisin
New York Times Bestselling Author and Multiple Hugo Award Winner
Event Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026, 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice awards. Most of her works have been optioned for television or film, and collectively her novels, including the Broken Earth trilogy, have sold over two million copies.

After 20 years working in higher education as an applied counseling psychologist, she “retired” in 2016 to become a full-time writer, writing instructor, and public speaker. She was a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops.

In her spare time, she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from KING Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.

Arthur Sze
National Book Award Winner for Poetry and 25th Poet Laureate of the United States
Event Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts
In partnership with Brick Street Poetry

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into 15 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

Patricia Lockwood
Dylan Thomas Prize Winner
Event Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
In partnership with Indiana Humanities

Patricia Lockwood is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, memoirist, and poet who was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all of the worst cities of the Midwest. She is known for her fearless voice and singular style that have reshaped the literary landscape. 

Lockwood is the author of the novel No One is Talking About This, a finalist for the Booker Prize and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021. The Atlantic hailed the book as one of the Great American Novels of the past 100 years. Her unforgettable memoir Priestdaddy, which recounts her unconventional upbringing as the daughter of a Catholic priest won the Thurber Prize—America’s top honor for humor writing—and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. The memoir was widely celebrated for its originality, humor, and candor.

She is also the author of two poetry collections and the viral prose-poem “Rape Joke,” which became a cultural touchstone for its raw, unflinching examination of personal trauma.

Her essays and criticism appear frequently in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.

Ling Ma
MacArthur Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Monday, November 9, 2026, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Ling Ma‘s most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which was named a National Indie Bestseller, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), described as a “meticulous, caustic description of life in big cities and what happens when a terrible pandemic slowly annihilates most of the human population.” Severance won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018, it has been translated into seven languages.

Ling’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, Buzzfeed, and more. Her fellowships and awards include a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Whiting Award, and an NEA creative writing fellowship.

Ling was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah and Kansas. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.

Elizabeth Acevedo & Claire Jimenez
Acevedo is the National Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature and Jimenez is the Winner of the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Event Date: Thursday, December 3, 2026, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Elizabeth Acevedo was the 2022 Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist.

Acevedo holds a BA in Performing Arts from George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC, with her love.

Claire Jimenez is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.

Emily Wilson
MacArthur Fellow and Award-Winning Poet and Translator
Event Date: Tuesday, February 16, 2027, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
In partnership with Butler’s Classics Program

Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor, and author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). She has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. 

Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is a Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

Rabih Alameddine
National Book Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Thursday, March 4, 2027, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Rabih Alameddine‘s most recent book is the acclaimed novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, which Publishers Weekly called “a ravishing performance.” His other books include Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art (2024), and six critically acclaimed novels, including The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Angel of History (2016); An Unnecessary Woman (2014), finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the California Book Award, and a Washington Post, Kirkus, and NPR Best Book of 2014; The Hakawati (2008); I, The Divine (2001); and Koolaids (1998). He is also the author of a book of short stories, The Perv (1999). Alameddine received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Born in Amman, Jordan, Alameddine grew up in Lebanon and Kuwait, lived in England, then moved to the United States. He earned a degree in Engineering from UCLA and an MBA in San Francisco before becoming a painter and novelist. He divides his time between Beirut and San Francisco.

Cathy Park Hong
New York Times Bestselling Author and National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
Event Date: Wednesday, March 17, 2027, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
In partnership with Butler’s Global and Historical Studies

Cathy Park Hong is an award-winning poet and nonfiction writer whose widely celebrated book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The work is part-memoir and part-cultural criticism conveying a radically honest meditation on the Asian American experience. Time named Cathy Park Hong one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 and her book Minor Feelings as one of the Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2020.

Hong is also the author of three poetry collections, including Dance Dance Revolution (which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize), Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic.

Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her BA from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Édouard Louis
Internationally Bestselling French Author
Event Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2027, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
In partnership with Butler’s Department of Sociology

“One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation” (The Guardian), Édouard Louis is the author of seven novels, The End of Eddy (2014), History of Violence (2016), Who Killed My Father (2018), Change (2021), A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (2022), Monique Escapes (2024), Que faire de la littérature? Méditations et Manifeste (2025), and Collapse (to be published in June 2026). He is also the editor of a collective volume devoted to the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu.

A close collaborator of renowned stage directors Stanislas Nordey (TNS), Thomas Ostermeier (Schaubühne Berlin), and Milo Rau (NTGent), he is the co-author of two plays, Au cœur de la violence and The Interrogation. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Freeman’s, etc. His books are translated into more than 30 languages, as well adapted for film and the theatre. In 2025, Éditions Points Seuil has published an eight-volume coffret featuring his complete works, along with a new collection of interviews.

Édouard Louis lives and works in Paris, France.

Jenny Odell
New York Times Bestselling Author
Event Date: Thursday, April 15, 2027, 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
In partnership with Butler’s Philosophy Program

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and author based in Oakland, California. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), was a New York Times bestseller. It was named One of the Best Books of the Year by a multitude of publications such as Time, The New Yorker, NPR, GQ, Elle, and others, including one of Barack Obama’s Best Books of 2019. She followed the huge critical success of that work with a second New York Times bestseller, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023). She is currently working on a book about repair.

Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra magazine, and other publications. Her visual work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), and apexart (NY).

Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screenshots, researching trash, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In general, she is searching for frameworks that allow us to perceive something new about everyday reality.

She’s been an artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University.