Fall 2025-26 Readings and Lectures
Matthew Burnside & Jessie van Eerden
Reading: Thursday, September 11, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Matthew Burnside is the author of Prospectus of Ambient Wonders forthcoming from kith books.
He is also the author multiple full-length books and several chapbooks, most recently Centrifugal:
Unstories, a short story collection, and the poetry collection Skull Kingdoms: An Imaginary
Omnibus. His work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Los Angeles Review,
Ploughshares, Passages North, DIAGRAM, PANK, Post Road, and others. He is not permitted to
have an indoor cat where he currently lives so he has many stray cat friends.
Jessie van Eerden is the author of two essay collections, Yoke & Feather (new from Dzanc
Books in November 2024) and The Long Weeping, and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio
Radio, and Call It Horses which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Her work has
appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, AGNI, Image, New England
Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Thomas and Lillie D.
Chaffin Award, the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction,
the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Van Eerden holds an
MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and has taught for over twenty years in college
classrooms and adult literacy programs.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing
Jaquira Díaz
Reading: Thursday, September 25, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Visual Arts Center Auditorium
Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico, she was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami
Beach. She is the author of the forthcoming novel This Is the Only Kingdom and Ordinary Girls:
A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award and a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, and finalist for
a Lambda Literary Award and the B&N Discover Prize. Ordinary Girls was optioned for
television and is currently in development. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair
in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for
Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She lives in New York and teaches at
Columbia University.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting
Speaker Fund
Mary Favret
Reading: Thursday, October 9, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Mary Favret is Professor of English at John Hopkins University. Professor Favret has been
teaching literature for over 30 years to undergraduate, graduate and continuing education
students. Her research often considers how experiences that seem distant or beyond our grasp
nevertheless penetrate our everyday life and shape our felt reality. A scholar of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, she has studied how the disruptions of political
revolution inflect the exchange of private letters (Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics
and the Fiction of Letters) and distant warfare filters into the rhythms of home (War at a
Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime). This work is inter-disciplinary,
drawing on literature, feminist and political theory, history and visual culture. She has written
extensively on Jane Austen’s fiction, its reception history and translation into film and TV.
Currently she is delving into an untold story within the history of reading: the circumstances that
make reading hard, painful or nearly impossible.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing, the Department of Modern
Languages, the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund, and Phi Beta Kappa
Heather Christle
Reading: Thursday, October 30, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Heather Christle is the author of In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by
Virginia Woolf (Algonquin) and The Crying Book (Catapult), a New York Times Editor’s Choice,
Indie Next selection, and national bestseller that was translated into eight languages, awarded the
Georgia Book Award for memoir, and adapted for radio by the BBC. An Assistant Professor of
English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Christle is also the author of four poetry
collections including The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Book Award and was
adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Her writing has been published in The
Believer, Elle, Granta, London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and she recently received
a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting
Speaker Fund
Crystal Hana Kim
Reading: Thursday, November 13, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Hollins Room, Library
“Translation vs. Transliteration vs. Multilingual Texts” Workshop
Friday, November 14, 2025 I 10:00 am -12:00 pm @ CLE Classroom, Library
Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024), a
finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award, and If
You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim
is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a
2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New
York with her family.
Sponsored by the Beanstalk Fund, a collaboration between Wyndham Robertson Library and the
Department of English and Creative Writing
Writers’ Harvest Reading
Thursday, December 4, 2025 I 7:30 pm @ Visual Arts Center Auditorium
Hollins faculty writers read from their work to raise money for the hungry. 100% of the proceeds
will be donated directly to Feeding Southwest Virginia. Come hear exciting new work by our
Hollins writers and help a very good cause at the same time!
Students: $5 or a nonperishable food item; general admission: $10
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing
Remica Bingham-Risher
Reading: Thursday, February 12, 2026 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is an alumna of Old Dominion
University and Bennington College. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Among
other journals, her work has been published in the New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, New
Letters, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the
Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013) shortlisted for the
Hurston/Wright Award, and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book
Award. Her first book of prose, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me
Up, was published by Beacon Press in 2022. Her book of poems along with family and historical
photographs, Room Swept Home, published by Wesleyan in February 2024, won the Los Angeles
Book Prize. She is currently the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old
Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Jackson Poetry Fund
drea brown
Reading: Thursday, February 26, 2026 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
drea brown is a Hollins Alumna queer Black feminist poet-scholar whose writing has appeared
in journals and anthologies such as Stand Our Ground: Poems for Marissa Alexander and
Trayvon Martin, Smithsonian Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Bellingham Review, and
About Place Journal. drea is the author of dear girl: a reckoning, winner of the Gold Line Press
2014 chapbook prize, and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and
Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Their newly released monograph Conjuring
the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women (University Press of Mississippi, 2025),
explores the role of haunting in Black women’s literature and lived experiences.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting
Speaker Fund
MFA Thesis Readings
Reading: Tuesday, March 10, 2026 I 6:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Reading: Tuesday, March 17, 2026 I 6:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Reading: Tuesday, April 7, 2026 I 6:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Second year MFA in Creative Writing students will read from their work. Each night will consist of
three or four students reading for fifteen minutes in a variety of genres. There will be a small
reception following each reading on the Porches of Main.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing
64th Annual Lex Allen Literary Festival 2026
Saturday April 11, 2026 I 9am-4pm g Visual Arts Center Auditorium and Second Floor
Schedule details forthcoming.
Readers: Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Rajia Hassib, and Nina MacLaughlin
Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of
Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay Honey came out in August 2023.
Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. Her first novel, In the Language of Miracles, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and received an honorable mention from the Arab American Book Awards. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Marshall University, and she has written for The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker online. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and two children.
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a finalist for the
Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Summer Solstice and Winter
Solstice (Black Sparrow), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first book was the acclaimed
memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sponsored by the Lex Allen Literary Endowment, Department of English and Creative Writing, and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund
Thomas J. Anderson III
Reading: Thursday, April 23, 2026 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Professor T.J. Anderson III was born in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and is a poet and musician. He is
the author of several works, including t/here it is (Omnidawn Press, 2023), Devonte Travels the
Sorry Route (Omnidawn Press, 2019), Cairo Workbook (Willow Books, 2014), River to Cross
(The Backwaters Press, 2009), Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz
Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2004), Blood Octave (Flat Five Recordings, 2006), and the
chapbook At Last Round Up (lift books, 1996). A former Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University,
Anderson currently resides in Roanoke, Virginia. He began teaching at Hollins University in
1998 and celebrates his retirement at the end of this year.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing
Farewell Reading – The Last Tango
Reading: Thursday, May 7, 2026 I 7:30 pm @ Green Drawing Room, Main Building
An open reading by Hollins seniors and graduating Creative Writing MFA students. One last
chance to hear our favorite student writers read before they depart.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing
Past Events
63rd Annual Lex Allen Literary Festival 2025
Saturday April 5, 2025 | 9am-4pm | Visual Arts Center Auditorium and Second Floor
Readers: Chanlee Luu, Martha Park, Jacinda Townsend
Chanlee Luu is a Vietnamese-Chinese American writer from southern Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing at Hollins University and BS in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia. She writes about identity, pop culture, science, politics, and everything in between. She can be found on Twitter @ChanleeLuu, and her work can be found in Snowflake Magazine, the gamut mag, Cutbow Quarterly, Tint Journal, diaCRITICS, and The Offing, among others. She is the winner of the 2024 Jean Feldman Poetry Award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Her debut collection, The Machine Autocorrects Code to I, was released in October 2024.
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Religion & Environment Story Project and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Martha’s writing, graphic essays, and illustrations have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere. Her first book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in the spring of 2025.
Jacinda Townsend grew up in Southcentral Kentucky and left for Harvard at the age of sixteen. It was there that she took her first creative writing classes. After doing time as a broadcast journalist and then an antitrust lawyer, Jacinda got her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before going on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. Jacinda recently finished work on a third novel, Trigger Warning. Trigger Warning is told in the alternating voices of Ruth Hurley, who changes her identity and moves across the country after her father is killed by police in the late eighties, and Myron Hurley, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, who spends the novel uncovering the truth about his wife. Jacinda teaches in the MFA program at Brown University and is mom to two children who amaze her daily.
Philip Metres
Reading: Thursday, April 24, 2025 | 7:30 pm | Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Philip Metres is the author of 12 books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. His writing has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry.
Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Farewell Reading – The Final Mashed Potato
Reading: Thursday, May 8, 2025 | 7:30 pm | Green Drawing Room, Main Building
An open reading by Hollins seniors and graduating Creative Writing MFA students. One last chance to hear our favorite student writers read before they depart.
Spring 2025, Past Readings & Lecture Series
Stephanie Burt
Meet and Greet with Students: Thursday, February 27, 2025 |12:00 pm | Hollins Room
Reading: Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 7:30 pm | Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Lecture: Friday, February 28, 2025 | 10:30 am | Hollins Room, Library
A literary critic and poet, Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times has called her “one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation.” She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and other publications.
An influential trans poet and critic, Burt was proclaimed “Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker” by The New York Times in 2012. Her collection We Are Mermaids (2022) is an exploration in poetry of the non-binary nature and “in-betweenness” of human existence. Burt’s most recent book is a new guide to enjoying poetry, Don’t Read Poetry (2023). The New Yorker said the work “evokes the contagious enthusiasm of a cool teacher.”
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund.
Kiki Petrosino
Reading: Thursday, March 13, 2025 | 7:30 pm | Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Spalding Prize, among other honors.
Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund.
Fall 2024 Reading & Lecture Series
Helen Phillips
Thursday, September 19 | 8:15pm | Wyndham Library
Phillips joins us to read and discuss her new novel, Hum, from Simon &
Schuster. She has been longlisted for the National Book Award and
currently teaches at CUNY in Brooklyn, NY.
Sarah Juliet Lauro, Ph.D.
Thursday, October 3 | 7:30pm | Wyndham Library
Lauro received her Ph.D. from UC Davis, and currently teaches at the
University of Tampa. She is most known for her scholarship on the myth
of the zombie, but also focuses on Carribean postcolonial literature.
Nathan Osorio
Thursday, October 24 | 7:30pm | VAC Auditorium
Osorio’s debut poetry collection, Querida, offers a place-based lyrical
meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, and
language. Enjoy his poems that explore his upbringing in Los Angeles.
Tara Sim
Thursday, November 7 | 7:30pm | Wyndham Library
Sim is the author of multiple YA and Adult fantasy series including
Timekeeper, Scavenge the Stars, and The Dark Gods. She joins us from
the Bay area to promote her recent standalone novel, We Shall Be Monsters.
Writers’ Harvest Reading
Thursday, December 5 | 7:30pm | VAC Auditorium
Join us for our annual fundraiser, where Hollins faculty writers showcase their work.
$5 or a nonperishable food item for Students, $10 for general admission.
100% of the proceeds will donated directly to Feeding Southwest Virginia.
Hollins MFA 