Delbrook Visiting Writers Series

Victoria Chang
Forward Prize and PEN/Voelcker Award Winner for Poetry
Event Date: Wednesday, September 17 at 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

Victoria Chang is a Taiwanese American poet, essayist, multimedia artist, and children’s author whose writing often includes themes about living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. Her most recent book of poems With My Back to the World (2024) received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, Lithub, and Electric Literature. Prior to that publication, her poetry collection The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) was named one of the “Best Books of 2022” by the New Yorker and The Guardian. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021) was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus and OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. OBIT was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Chang has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Catherine Lacey
Whiting Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Wednesday, October 1 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
Co-Sponsored by LGBTQIA+ Faculty & Staff Community and Golden Hour Books

Catherine Lacey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She is the author of six books, most recently The Möbius Book and Biography of X. Lacey’s debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing was described as “dreamy and fierce at the same time” by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. Her novel Pew was shortlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction, among other accolades.

Lacey earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. She has served as the University of Montana’s Kittredge Visiting Writer and the John & Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She currently lives in México City with her husband, poet, essayist, and novelist Daniel Saldaña París.

Safiya Sinclair
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Autobiography and Whiting Award Winner for Poetry
Event Date: Wednesday, November 5 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
Co-sponsored by Global and Historical Studies

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon which was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, individuals, and organizations, such as President Barack Obama, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, and others. Plus, it was a Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club pick. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon also received recognition and was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine. Sinclair is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Sigrid Nunez
National Book Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Monday, November 17 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Sigrid Nunez is the distinguished author of nine novels, the first of which was published when she was in her 40’s. Born and raised in New York City, she’s the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. Nunez grew up in the projects, went on to study English at Barnard College, and later got a master of fine arts from Columbia University.

Her body of work includes the novels A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been adapted into a film. Her 2020 novel What Are You Going Through has also been recently adapted into the Golden Lion-winning film The Room Next Door by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

Wyatt Mason of The New York Times Magazine referred to Nunez as a “master of noticing” who “smuggles profound reflections on pain and loss into novels of deceptive lightness.” Nunez’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her internationally loved work has been translated in over 30 languages.

Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She lives in New York City.

Clint Smith
New York Times Bestselling Author and Staff Writer at the Atlantic
Event Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Clint Smith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Clint has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.

Previously, Clint taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.

Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.

Morgan Parker
Award-Winning Poet, Essayist, and Novelist
Event Date: Thursday, February 19, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by the New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”

“Ignore Ms. Parker at your peril,” acclaimed poet Patricia Smith warns, and we second the sentiment. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For, was published in 2024 and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Saeed Jones calls it, “…the kind of book that saves lives,” and Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, praises You Get What You Pay For as “an engrossing journey through Parker’s expansive and gifted mind.”

Morgan received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Best American Poetry; a Broadway playbill; and two Common albums. Morgan is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, a WGA member, and a Sagittarius. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Shirley.

Michael Farris Smith
Award-Winning Author and Screenwriter
Event Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, Book Riot, and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. As a screenwriter, he scripted the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. With his band The Smokes, Smith wrote and released the record Lostville, which was produced by Grammy nominee Jimbo Mathus. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.

Dorianne Laux
Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award Finalist for Poetry
Event Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection of poetry is Life On Earth and was released in January of 2024 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024.

Ruth Ozeki
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Event Date: Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.

Her new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, published by Viking in September 2021, tells the story of a young boy who, after the death of his father, starts to hear voices and finds solace in the companionship of his very own book.Her novels, My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2022) have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. Her work of personal non-fiction, The Face: A Time Code (2016), was published by Restless Books as part of their groundbreaking series called The Face.

Ruth’s documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country.

A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation. She is now Professor Emerita of English Language & Literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she divides her

Kali Fajardo-Anstine
National Book Award and PEN/Bingham Prize Finalist
Event Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is an award-winning novelist who draws from her Southern Colorado heritage and life experiences living across the American West. Her writing and lectures reflect her own heritage as a Colorado Chicana with roots in Indigenous, Latina, and Filipino cultures and her books feature the Indigenous and Latino people of Colorado.

She is a National Book Award Finalist for her debut story collection, Sabrina & Corina. Additionally, Sabrina & Corina was a finalist for the Story Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and the winner of the American Book Award. Fajardo-Anstine’s first novel, Woman of Light, was hailed as “A feat of old-school storytelling” by The Guardian. It is a national bestseller and was selected as a Good Morning America Book Buzz pick in October 2022.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida. She was the 2022-2024 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.